This is the time of year when we sort the wheat from the chaff and decide which of our weanlings we keep and which we sell. Most of the boys will be sold as trios as alpacas are herd animals and should never be kept alone.
The number of boys that are good enough to be used as stud males is always tiny as they need to be better than the females in your herd so as to increase the quality of their progeny. Here is Roma, an intermediate male, that we think will make the grade.
The other horror is deciding who gets into the show team for the British Alpaca Society National Show at the end of March. You have to book the number of places you want before Christmas and pay £50 per animal, pretty steep but it is a chance to see how your alpacas fare against some stiff competition. The gossip is normally quite good too.
The next step is to put in your named entries, the deadline midnight February 5. We were up against it as there were several days of Devon drizzle and we were making our final decisions on the morning of deadline day. It is all a bit mind-numbing as so many of the juniors are extremely similar.
