Alpacas

Little Hereward had to be put to sleep on Sunday morning. He was born on the Thursday, spent much of Friday at the vet's, and was bottle-fed a bit by my mother on the Saturday, but was clearly not about to start thriving. He wouldn't suck and didn't quite seem to have got the hang of swallowing either, and despite my mother's patiently dropping milk into his mouth bit by bit he was getting weaker all the time. It was like he was too bowled over by the world to know how to begin to start living in it; he could scramble to his feet and lurch about a bit but then he would collapse and just sit there looking overwhelmed. Ending it was the sensible decision, but it was horrible to see his mother, Dorcas, waiting for ages by the paddock gate as the other alpacas grazed. We went in to move her and Delphie down to join the main herd, so that Dorcas would at least have last year's baby as company, and she kept looking really hard into our faces and making the noise that mother alpacas make to their cria. Poor soul. I think the alpacas see us as agents of change, and are wary of us when all is well, but when things are going wrong they are often very friendly, and since he'd been to the vet's once and come back it's not surprising she was still waiting for him.

Farmers round Devon, and presumably elsewhere too, say that if you've got livestock you've got dead stock. I don't think my parents would put it that way, but when things just aren't viable it's not a good idea to keep fighting for too long. I was there when little Georgie was put to sleep last year, after a truly disgusting maggots-hatching-on-her-while-I-was-holding-her-in-the-car-back-from-the-vet experience. (They got on me! I showered for ages. Maggots hatching on a living animal right in front of you is not something you ever want to see.) My parents fought to keep her going, perhaps for too long; her inability to suckle was a symptom of much worse things happening inside her, and the net result was that she had a longer but pretty unpleasant life.

Nonetheless sometimes it works out OK and one of the boys they handreared last year has grown up into this ridiculous ball of fluff:

He used to have a slight head tremor but I think he's now basically held up by all the wool. Here are some of them eating from the half-pipes of drain which my parents use as little troughs; the brown one in the front is Gwarakusi (an Aymara name, e.g. geographically appropriate, provided by mdam, though we did adapt the spelling a bit):

And here is Gertrude, an elegant yearling:

I think she may be a Babylonian dragon in disguise (apologies for a bad photo, which I took at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum in December):