Halter Training 2016

Halter Training has been progressing well, Maverick seems to have mastered it.

Meet Eden Valley 'Maverick'

This is Eden Valley 'Maverick' with his mum Blanche.  Maverick was born on Sunday 2nd August and he's the first cria of 2015 for us and only the 4th to be born into our herd.

This is a close up of his fleece, very tight curls, looks very promising.

Matthew and Premiere - on the cover of a magazine.

This is the picture that has been used on the 2015 spring edition of Alpaca World Magazine, it was taken at the North West Alpaca Group show in Carlisle and was taken by Harvey Brown from Blackberry Alpacas.

North West Alpaca Show (NWAG) in Carlisle

Results from our very first Alpaca Show:

Eclipse was placed 5th out of 8

Premiere was placed 5th out of 9

Amira was placed 4th out of 8

Some Pictures from the show:

Getting ready for Junior Handlers

Matthew doing Junior Handlers

and receiving a 1st place

Gemma doing Junior Handlers and also received a 1st Place.

Halter Training

Well, we've had a very interesting weekend here at Eden Valley Alpacas.

It's been a week since we weaned Premiere, Amira and Eclipse so we decided that it was time we started halter training.

Halter training is something that both I and the kids had been looking forward to. It would be our very first time halter training alpacas, or any animal, for that matter.

Gemma and I started with the training first thing on Saturday morning. We started by introducing the cria to the halters.  We thought that it was going to take a while for them to get used to having the halters on but we were both pleasantly surprised when after a short period of time they weren't bothered at all about having them on. After about 20 minutes, we took the halters off and left Premiere, Amira and Eclipse to 'recover' from their experience.

I had thought that we wouldn't start leading them until Sunday but when Gemma, Matthew and I returned to the field an hour later, they took to the halters straight away. We agreed to give leading a go.  Amira seemed to get the idea very quickly, Eclipse and Premiere needed a lot more patience and coaching.  Eclipse had been quite lively but soon calmed down and understood what she was supposed to be doing.  That left Premiere, the only boy and the most awkward of the three.  He very quickly learned that he could simply fall over and 'play dead'.  He did this quite a lot in the early stages and although he improved later on in the day he continued the bad habit.

After a few attempts at different times throughout Saturday, Premiere did start to improve but we couldn't stop him from lying down.  We agreed to leave it for the day and try again in the morning.

Sunday morning came and Gemma was determined to stop Premiere from lying down all the time. She persevered and eventually it paid off - Premiere finally understood that he was supposed to walk while being led.  This was a major achievement because it was our first halter training experience and after 2 days all three of our Cria had mastered it.

Here are some pictures from the weekend.

    

Jet -The Greedy Alpaca

Jet is a lovely Alpaca who is completely in love with food.  She's always the first to the feeding troughs and is always pushing to the front to be hand fed.  I noticed the last few evenings that the hen food feeder had been tipped over and all the feed had been eaten.  I wondered what or who it was that could be knocking it over, well yesterday morning I realised exactly who it was......  I had fed the Alpaca and the hens and went inside for some breakfast, I watched to see Jet walk around to the hen food, I didn't see her knock the feeder over but went to check and sure enough, she was eating the hen food after knocking over the feeder.

This morning I moved the feeder under the hen shelter (pic below) and this was jet trying to work out how she was going to get her fill !   She was looking for ages before finally giving up....... 

Amira - What a beauty

This is the youngest of our herd, Amira.