Shared Custody Agreement

So there we were back in August eagerly awaiting the due date of arguably the most valuable colored female on our farm, Reality (SHRA Virtual’s Reality if you seek her out on ARI). How important was/is she to us and our big picture? We already have two of her daughters holding court in our foundation herd: Nutmeg, who was her first as well as her younger sister, Acomani, who was named after their prepotent maternal granddam. One of their brothers, Mirage, also holds down a spot in our stud barn. Mirage’s full sibling, Salve, was lost at a young age (@18 months) a few years ago, otherwise she too would undoubtedly be here in our foundation herd. The long and the short of it being that Reality kids are held very closely, hoarded even some might say. In a breeding program that is inarguably weighted towards the lighter colors, Reality (who is light brown) and her extended family represent an integral and almost irreplaceable part of the colored genetics here at CCNF.

A major reason for our sense of anticipation this time around was that it had been a couple of years since Reality had actually had a live birth (she had miscarried her 2009 pregnancy midwinter and had been held open).  Though we spent this past season with her grandsons, Wayfarer (Nutmeg’s Ring of Fire cria) and Troy (our first Mirage kid) as members of the show string, it had felt quite odd to be out on the show circuit for the first time in years without one of Reality’s own crias helping our cause. Well as luck would have it, fate wasn’t any kinder to us, or to Reality, in 2010 than it had been the year prior and our beloved girl ended up having a stillborn cria after all of that. I have quite honestly repressed the gender of the baby, both for the protection of my own mental health and because, well, it unfortunately doesn’t do anyone any good. Crappity, crap, crap. Honestly on the day itself my reaction was a tad more colorful than that but I’m trying to remain at least PG-13 here.

Now some three weeks prior to that rather unfortunate event another female of ours, Love Angel, had given birth to a beautiful little beige Archangel son. Though we were thrilled to see this first Messiah/Archangel/Quechua cross hit the ground, we were less than psyched when we realized that the cria in question was born septic (sepsis is essentially a body-wide infection) with deep purple discoloration all around his lips and nose and an elevated body temp from the get-go. Now while we (read Jen) are more than capable of setting up an IV catheter for administering the proper antibiotics and coping with such a diagnosis, there was another problem that came along for the ride that was not so easily dealt with. Love Angel’s milk, while technically present, was nowhere near the normal quantities needed to support a newborn cria. She was a first time mom and would thus have normally been looked at suspiciously. However given her maternal line’s excellent track record where all things lactation are concerned, the current hypothesis is that whatever caused the cria’s infection also caused mom’s natural lactation switch to not turn on properly.  Love Angel was (and still is) a fantastic and attentive mother to her little guy (since named Octavio) and she did everything else right. The baby was nursing enthusiastically as soon as one could have wished for. The problem was, the proverbial cupboard was bare…

Thankfully alpacas are very adaptive creatures. In addition to offering Octavio regular bottles of lambs milk replacer (over the years it’s what has worked best for us) we also put him and his dam into a feed group with several other extremely nurturing (and more importantly, lactating) moms so that he would have a chance to play the occasional milk snitch. Our black foundation female, Opal, seemed to be particularly tolerant of having multiple crias nurse off of her, at least in the short term. Alas, all of that combined was really just enough to help Octavio more or less just hold his weight and he was, at best, only ticking up a couple of ounces every few days. Not nearly the daily .4 lb. gain we have come to see as the targeted normal for our newborns over the years.  Then to add insult to injury and much to our consternation he started to refuse the bottle altogether. “You little bugger, don’t you want to live?!” Grrr. What could we do? We really don’t view tubing as a long term solution, we can do it easily enough but it’s invasive and stressful for all involved. We were between a rock and a hard place. Then sweet Reality had her latest bout of misfortune and an opportunity came knocking…

Complete credit goes to my wife for having a moment of inspiration. Just 20 minutes after Reality delivered her stillborn cria, Jen, figuring that at the very least we really had nothing to lose, had the wherewithal to take the dead cria away from its dam and replace it in the bonding pen with an initially non-plussed Octavio.  As an added bonus he also had the pleasure of being rubbed all over with Reality’s afterbirth in a hopeful attempt to convince his would-be wet nurse that her new cria was in fact a three week old beige male. Please, please, please! It’s all kind of funny now, though at the time it felt very touch and go. I hold our old foundation girls in the highest esteem. There is an undeniable sense of emotional intelligence in many of those animals and though I think that Reality was not completely convinced by our ruse, she did nonetheless decide to play along and allow “her” new cria to nurse almost immediately. Unlike Love Angel, who was in a nearby feed group calling to her cria and wondering where the evil humans had taken him, Reality’s udder was like the milk bar of plenty. Octavio for his part took a little while to make the adjustment fully. After weeks of being kicked away or spat at by other females in his feed group when he would try to steal a sip of milk, he was understandably hesitant to stand in there with full gusto. Though once he got the message that Reality had more or less adopted him, he nursed without hesitation and within a few hours we saw him for the first time in his short life break contact himself and cush down for a morning nap fully contented and, more importantly, with a full tummy. Life was good.

Of course during all of this there was still the matter of his actual mom, Love Angel, who in spite of her relatively dry udder was very much attached to her baby and vice-versa. So it was that after roughly 36 hours together in the bonding pen, Reality and Octavio were returned to the feed group that contained his biological mother as well. Though Love Angel and Reality seemed to be a little confused by the presence of one another in “their” cria’s life, they ultimately took it all in stride. In those first few days as a newly energized Octavio went sprinting out the door with the other crias (we tend to have between 5 and 10 mother/cria pairs in each feed group) it was not uncommon to have both of his mothers calling and chasing after him. In Love Angel’s view her son had never displayed such energy before (he was starting to pack on .6 lb./day). For her part, poor Reality had never had one of her newborns go sprinting to the bottom of the pasture, I mean what’s a mother to do? It was perhaps some 2 to 3 weeks later while doing night check on the Arena that I was privileged to witness something that sounds made up: Octavio cushed and sleeping literally between his biological mother and his adoptive one. Eat your heart out Walt Disney, that’s pretty magical stuff.

This was, alas, not the first time we’ve had to ask one of our girls to adopt someone else’s cria. We had pulled a version of this off once before years ago when our huacaya foundation female, Olvana, actually raised an orphaned suri male as her own. As amazing as it is, it’s obviously not something we hope to see again anytime soon for the simple reason that it means something has gone awry. It also goes without saying that though Reality will have gone another year here without a live cria of her own, she now holds an even more special place in the annals of this farm’s ongoing story because of 2010 and her willingness to take Octavio under her wing. At least in this case, it seemed that the only thing better than one doting mother…was two!