The preferred exit strategy

We had been on pins and needles lately with one of our girls, Boheme, who was well past her initial due date. Though we’ve had completely normal births past 365 days even, we’d be fibbing if we didn’t admit that anywhere past that 355 to 360 day mark starts to make us all feel a wee bit twitchy around here.

We had purchased Ms. Thing a few years ago from Judith and Jeff Zimbalist at Chatham Alpacas to add some of Peruvian Lancaster’s potent genetics into our colored breeding program. That was all good and two years ago when Matrix Majesty first came to town, we matched the two of them up thinking that that breeding made a lot of sense on paper. As it turned out, it did, it’s just that poor Boheme really had to go through the wringer to give us her first daughter, Musette. To be precise she had a uterine torsion with a 720 degree twist that required a birth by cesarean section, called for all hands on deck (our super awesome vet plus the entire farm staff), and ended with a whole lot of blood in the Arena’s vet room. That wasn’t fun at all and I even got to do the good part of getting the newly delivered female cria going! Rather than retell that tale in grizzly detail again, I will just refer you in chronological order to the relevant blog posts from last year here, here, here, and here.

So even though Boheme and Musette did ultimately bond as mother and daughter in their own way (they always slept side by side for instance), by the time Boheme was pain-free enough last year to even think of letting her baby nurse, Musette had already adapted to nursing hungrily from a large hanging goat bottle. So quite aside from the question of whether Boheme would deliver a cria normally this year, there was also the question of whether she would let that cria nurse? Well the short, easy, and happy answers to both of those questions arrived on Saturday morning when Boheme went into labor and proceeded to vaginally deliver a perfectly lovely little (ok, not so little, 21 lb.) white Ring of Fire daughter! Of course not ones to take any chances after last year’s drama, Jen did scrub up and check to make sure that the baby was presenting normally, with a head and two front legs. As soon as she felt that all was well though, the mood got positively giddy  – at least for us humans who didn’t still have to push out a 20+ pound cria. We were even more thrilled when shortly after being born, the young lady in question was also seen nursing off of her mama without any trouble at all. Success!

While there are always things that can (and do) go amiss in a herd of this size, it is nonetheless safe to say that we all slept a little sounder Saturday night knowing that Boheme had finally had her 2013 cria with virtually no fanfare. Now if we can just come up with a name…

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