Last weekend was the first British Alpaca Society National Show since 2019. Some 600 alpacas rocked up along with so many breeders we hadn’t seen in ages. There was much gossip!
We took a little show team of ten who did extremely well given the high standard of the competition. There were two rings and two judges, one doing the males and the other the females. All the action, ha ha, not a lot of action at an alpaca show, was filmed and shown on massive screens above each ring. This gives the audience the chance to see close ups of each animal’s fleece as 60% of the judging is on fleece.
Quite a few rosettes for us with four firsts, three seconds, two thirds and ahem, a sixth. Each class has 12 alpacas in it and the judge pulls forward six. The other six are dismissed from the ring and have to leave doing ‘the walk of shame’ as we laughingly call it.
Here are a couple of pictures of Chas with CME Juniper, a fawn junior, and CME Cicero, a fawn adult, both first in their respective classes.
The icing on the cake for us was winning the Sire’s Progeny class. This is an important class as it demonstrates what your stud male is achieving in terms of quality over your females. We picked two junior males and a junior female, all white, all peas in a pod as the judge said. Three cheers for Houghton Placido.
