Temperance
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 1, 2022
Thanks for the summary! It's uncanny how the Tranchers have managed to do everything wrong.Cliff notes from this video:
Inexperienced ranchers should not be rescuing alpacas, they should have gotten a small herd of 3 or 6 from a reputable breeder
NEVER EVER mix male or female. They don't breed on a heat cycle, the males will just breed them whenever which can cause UTIs. A male breeding a pregnant female may cause an abortion. The male can actually end up killing the baby trying to breed the female during delivery because of a hormone spike.
Don't keep them with sheep, horse, chickens, etc. Not companions for alpaca.
Alpacas need copper in their diet, copper will kill sheep. Disease tolerance is higher in sheep and goats which then parasites can spread to alpaca and kill them. However they might be being saved a bit by the dry climate. Goats can be bullies and injure alpaca.
"some people just won't learn until the animals are dead"
Alpacas must be sheared once a year in the spring, this is vital to their health. They will suffer from heat and the weight of the blanket, can have a heat stroke in the summer and die. Heat stress is very serious.
So they pretty much fucked up everything, the video didn't even mention anything about getting way too big a herd to start with because I guess that would be such an obvious 'do not do this'. It's a cute video though and not very long so you should still watch it!
The lady in the video really emphasized the seriousness of heat stress (which is why shearing is so important). She said if you see your alpacas standing in their drinking water, that's a bad sign; they're too hot! See 12:47 to 13:43 in the video. You generally shouldn't spray water on your alpacas either, although it's probably okay IF they've recently been shorn and IF you only spray their legs & chest. Spraying water on their backs or letting the alpacas immerse themselves in water is bad since it causes matting of the fur, making it so heat gets trapped more easily. It can also lead to rotting of the fur & skin!
I mention this because the Tranchers spray their alpacas all the time! I didn't know this was actually bad for them...






Yep, Pepe is a vicuna and is beloved by Penny. Penny sees him as a "lovable scamp" and laughs about how often Pepe manages to break into the female alpaca enclosures. It's a serious problem and undoubtedly the source of many of their "unexpected pregnancies", but Penny just thinks it's funny.Pepe, one of their most-photographed animals, is a Vicuña I believe.
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I'm having trouble finding the tweets, but I swear I remember Penny calling Pepe a "scamp" and an "escape artist". I also remember him commenting on how Pepe always manages to break through or jump over their fences/barriers. Here are a few related tweets, although they aren't the ones I'm thinking of:



This one is close to what I was thinking of, but it's not Pepe:

I seriously think Penny went back and deleted tweets at some point after getting criticism for the totally mysterious, unexpected pregnancies (



