Show String Selection Time

Well it’s that time of the year again: the spring shows have all opened up their registration systems and now, after months of hemming and hawing, we have to name our team’s final rosters. Picking one’s show animals is something that I’m sure is done somewhat differently depending both upon the farm/ranch in question and especially upon the size of the herd from which one is selecting those animals. Were you to have watched us go through this same process some 10+ years ago you would have seen that it was as simple as choosing the juveniles and yearlings that looked more or less decent, not exactly a science. Back when we had 5 crias born in a given year all 5 of those animals–unless someone was just absolutely butt ugly–would have gone out on the road with us. Four legs and a pulse usually made a show critter back then. Not so anymore.

Over the years the selection process has evolved quite a bit, not the least because of the increase in our herd size circa 1999 vs. 2011. Of course the standard (but not a breed standard the apparition of which might well be a sign of the coming apocalypse, or so I’ve been told) for what makes an award winning show animal has changed quite a lot in that time as well. Let’s face it: if you went to an alpaca show in back 2000 you could, at most shows, usually pick out the top 3 to 5 animals in any given class from several hundred yards away. The differences in just basic conformational correctness between those top animals and those ranked below them was often quite stark. The differences in fleece quality were often just as severe if not more so. Nowadays though those differences (in both conformation and fleece) are far less apparent and the overall quality has improved to the point that differences between the top animals and those below them tend to be much smaller now in most cases.

So I got a bit off topic there. Having said all of that though we still have to go about selecting the 20+ males and females that will board the CCNF bus to the North American, Futurity, and possibly one other show to be named later this coming spring. The goal is to bring out our best and put our breeding program’s best foot forward. Though we do not expect that we will win all of the time and not even most of the time what we do expect is that our alpacas will seriously compete all of the time. Frankly the expense and the stress is not otherwise justifiable.

Those animals that are yearlings or older are by now reasonably static and we really have a pretty good handle (no pun intended) on what they are about. Though we will occasionally take an older male or female to the shows (both Avenger and Pristine, for instance, went out for a final turn last spring @ the age of 3), for the most part once our critters reach breeding age they are retired from the show circuit. So for the majority of this spring’s yearlings, this will be their final go-round before they go into production. Not that the entire age group from the previous season (in this case last fall) will automatically make the cut. Animals and fleeces do change and the reality is that sometimes last year’s ribbon winner is just simply no longer making the grade and/or someone else has moved above them on the depth chart and knocked them out of a slot in the string. Though we do have one big bad-ass trailer, even its capacity is finite.

The juveniles are even more of a moving target than the yearlings though and choosing show animals from amongst the weaners two to three months prior to entering the actual ring can be particularly tricky. For a juvenile alpaca 8 weeks can be an eternity in terms of the way their fleeces can grow and change (for better or for worse). At some point though we end up making our most educated guesses and letting it all ride. It starts as a process though. We begin an informal ranking of our juveniles probably when they are somewhere between 2 and 3 months of age.  It is that list that is our starting point for choosing the little buggers that will finally populate the roster for the following show season. There is also usually, depending upon the year, a core group of 5 to 10 juvis that we more or less know will be on the string from the time they are quite little even though they may shift within the internal rankings. It’s the filling out of those slots behind that core group that tends to be a bit more competitive, especially in the lighter colors (I’m guessing that 80% of our herd of 200+ animals is medium fawn or lighter). It’s not uncommon for us to have 5 or 6 candidates for the three slots we have for juvenile white males say. In all cases though we are quite simply looking to be impressed when we open up the fleeces of those little ones. There are obviously alpacas that will be stronger in one facet vs. another (finer, denser, brighter, etc…) so the trick is trying to figure out which ones ultimately get the highest overall “score.” We have certainly been known to line up 2 or 3 juveniles side by side to do our own in-house comparative judging, hoping that when we make our final selections we get them right more often than not. Of course as anyone that has spent a day here with us knows, there is not always consensus on which animal ranks where in the greater scheme of things and there is often some friendly (and occasionally heated) debate. We try at least to be our own toughest critics. It’s all part of the fun in any case. The real test will of course come in early April when those same animals we selected enter the actual show ring for the first time…