Rounding into form

Though we have not been helped by the cold/flu/stomach-bug-to-be-named-later making its way through the ranks of the CCNF alpaca trainers, it is possible now with just over a week to go before we head down to Springfield, MA for this year’s edition of the North American Alpaca Show, to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Not that any of this three ring circus isn’t completely by choice, March and April have always been some of our craziest months here on the farm.

Though there are opportunities to show alpacas almost year round, if we chose to, for more than 10 years now we have used the big April shows as the true start of our yearly show schedule. It gives the year a nice balance. In the spring we drive all over the place (some for the farm, a lot for our kids’ after school pursuits), show, shear, and start delivering crias. In the summer we do the vast majority of our baby catching as well as probably 80% of the breedings here in our herd. In the fall, the baby making/catching slowly tails off and we go back on the road for a couple of smaller regional shows. Then the winter comes and we catch up on all of the stuff that got put to the side beforehand as well as take some family vacation time away from the farm.

What that means though is that after 4 1/2 months of relative calm, come late February, we shift gears in a pretty big way. Not only do the weanling show animals need to be chosen and trained but all of the show gear (fans, banners, tables, stall mats, etc…) must come out of mothballs again. With a 20+ hour haul out to Kansas City in the offing for the Futurity, the farm truck and our large trailer will also each be given the once over to make sure that all is in good working condition. Ever broken down with a full sized, fully loaded alpaca trailer before? I have. It sucks.

Of course fixing wheels, bearings, brakes, axles, engines, and generators is in many ways the easy part. The rookie show animals are more challenging and definitely more time consuming as well.  We began several weeks back with a list of 25 untrained weaners but as of today I am happy to say that there are only 2 of them that could not functionally walk (read: not completely humiliate their handlers) into a show ring. That final duo will go into the round pen for the first time in next few days and will hopefully join their peers in walking up and down the hill by this weekend. For the the past few days we’ve been fastidiously putting the rest of them that still needed some extended study time through their paces and we’ve all got the sore right shoulders to prove it too! We’ve made good progress though. Some animals who seemed like real head cases when they first came out of the round pen are now walking on completely slack lead lines.

Jen’s desk up at the Main Barn has a big old worksheet on it that lists every animal that is going on the road this April whether they are 6 months or 36 months of age (we have two token adult males coming to the NAAS). That sheet is covered in a series of slashes, check marks, asterisks, and different highlighter colors across the animal’s names themselves all conveying to Jen, Kim, and myself where a given member of the show string is in their readiness for the ring. Not that we believe that all will be trained perfectly. While that’s always the goal, we’ve also been doing this long enough that we know to temper our expectations. For instance, the chances of a yearling male alpaca (think hormones!) submitting to being groped by a stranger front, side, and back before then getting the show ring equivalent of “please turn your head and cough” without at least some protestation are fairly slim. All we ask is that ultimately they do submit, that they generally look good doing it, and that they be calm enough that those of us on the other end of the lead line don’t get too thrashed about. Given that this showing business is after all first and foremost a direct way for us to market our breeding program, we obviously want to project an aura of calm even if only for the 20 minutes or so that a given critter is in the ring. Though it’s obviously helpful on those occasions when we have animals that seem to actually like and thrive in the environment of the show ring — and in those cases it’s just the way they were hard-wired at birth, we don’t take any credit for that — we’re also ok with them just faking it for while too. As of right now we have 10 days to go until the first of those rookie show animals walks into a ring with a judge present and we are starting to feel cautiously optimistic that most of them will in fact walk. Stay tuned…

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