Miscarriage…
Occasionally an alpaca will slip a pregnancy over the winter and the first you know about is when you spit them off in the spring or just realise that they’re not getting any bigger. Fortunately it is a rare occurrence but today I quite accidentally came across an aborted foetus in one of the fields. We are not sure which female it is as none of them appear distressed or show any physical signs. From the size of the foetus we have narrowed it down to four females all of which were mated in October ( the last group of the year ) and we’ll spit them off at the weekend to find out which one.
January 26th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Wow, we’ve had slipped pregnancies of course, but never seen anything like this – the birds always get in too fast for any evidence to be left
January 26th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Sorry to hear that. Never fun when it happens.
We had one just before Christmas eve. Extremely cold out. Could be stress, or something else we will never find out about.
January 26th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Thanks for posting the photo of the poor little aborted mite, so we can see what size it was. I read somewhere that of all livestock, alpacas can abort fairly easily; probably due to the extreme conditions in South America, where life can be perilous. I think our conditions recently in this country have been fairly testing for alpacas (and humans) and because dams can stall their pregnancies to a certain extent, we are now expecting our spring babes in July!! Jenny
January 27th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Thanks for the comments everyone, I guess its just one of those things you have to take on the chin when you decice to breed livestock!! I’m sure the cold weather won’t have helped with the early pregnant so we’ll be keeping a very close eye on them.
January 30th, 2010 at 3:07 am
Hi,
I came across one today also. It was a fair bit larger than this one. Have no idea out of two females which one it happened to. But was told when we brought them that one was unable to carry pregnancies so I think this may be the mother. It weight about 500 or so grams and the cord and placenta was still attached but the baby had been removed from the sac. Not sure if the mother did this??