Close only counts in bocce, horse shoes, and hand grenades: fiber boys at CCNF

For years we have felt that non-breeding alpaca males are the natural by-product of a serious breeding program. While everyone must of course use their own standard when evaluating young boys (and sometimes older boys too), we generally feel that if we are really asking ourselves whether a given male is a legitimate Herdsire prospect then we already know the answer. The reality for some time here has been that somewhere around 90% of the males born here each year end up being culled from the breeding program. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t great animals with some really strong characteristics though, it just means that they aren’t great enough. We want to look at a young male and say, “Yeah, give me 10 of those!” If ultimately we can’t, then they end up culled from the herd as non-breeding males.

When we make that call on a given male can vary. Sometimes we know a boy was sent to us from the Department-of-Not-Happening the second they are born, while others that we may rate quite highly as juveniles and even yearlings may well flatline in their development and ultimately drop off of the depth chart. Every year we go through and do an internal evaluation cutting out those males that we feel aren’t making the grade. That took place in a semi-official way yesterday as Jen and I went through the male and female juvenile feed groups picking out our show strings for this coming fall.  As you can see from the listings I just posted (in truth, amended) on our web site, show records even are no guarantee of future work as a breeder in our program. With National Alpaca Farm Days coming up in about 10 days time though, we wanted to make sure that we actually had some (there are more…there are always more) of our non-breeding males defined and posted on our site. Like some of our print ads have said for years: if you are looking for that special fiber animal, at a very reasonable price, boy have we got them…