Herd health, herd smealth

So we whacked out an (almost) full sized version of herd health day yesterday in under 6 hours. Under 5 hours actually if you don’t count lunch. Dare I say it was almost enjoyable? There is no doubt that, in this case especially, many hands made light work though. Having already tended late last week to the group of 40 +/- females that have been living in the outer paddocks below the Arena, it left us yesterday with roughly 200 critters to deworm, vaccinate, and trim the toe nails on. That we were able to breeze though it all on a Thursday no less when one member of the crew has to leave early at noon (myself or Jennifer) to go get our kids from early dismissal and then Kim has to split around 2:30 to get her boys, just made it that much more gratifying. Like taking a foul tasting cough syrup where the anticipation is a killer, you always feel better once the deed is done.

I have to say that the quiet banter that goes on amongst the team as we are plugging away at the task at hand, reminds me most of the types of conversations that I remember the doctors and nurses having over surgery on the show MASH when I was a kid. Occasionally the topics are profound (group session anyone? let’s role play!) though more often than not it’s filled with snarky jests back and forth, most of which I can’t print here due to content. One thing it all undoubtedly is at this point though, is relaxed. We’ve been really fortunate to have had the same bunch of folks working at CCNF for several year running now and as during shearing, it means that everyone knows what to do and how to do it. Most of the communication between us all as we’re doing herd health is really non-verbal and that in and of itself probably allows the alpacas to be a bit more chilled out as well. It of course also helps that over time the herd as gotten progressively younger and more importantly domestically born and thus they are more familiar and comfortable with us, their shepherds. Long gone are the days years ago when we had 20+ imported females for whom getting caught and handled was a major stress experience. I think I can now count on one hand the number of stress-mongers in our herd and relative to the good old days, they’re just not that bad. I think all of yesterday I only had one female — our geriatric and soon to be retired 5P girl, Cangalli who has more than earned the right to freak out however she chooses — try to pee on me as I was trimming her feet. As recently as 5 years ago I would have ended herd health day here smelling of alpaca urine, amongst other things. In any case yesterday was one fairly tedious task, dispatched in short order that we now wont have to think about again (we trim nails every 2 months) until we’re done with the fall show season. Now, if we can just figure out who the fall show animals are: the dusty one, the dusty one, and YOU the dusty one.