Tuesday 17 May 2011

A Change For The Better.

Hi All,

Well it has been a busy weekend for us as we have decided to redesign the inside of one of our barns. We have been meaning to arrange the barn since last year, as it was not working for us how we would of liked it to.

As you are all aware trying to keep the stress levels down with alpacas is an important role of keeping alpacas, so making the handling areas as least stressful as possible was our aim with the barn. We are creating a carousel affect within the barn allowing all the alpacas that we require to be handled for husbandry duties or shearing to be moved around to the appropriate stages in the barn and then released into a final holding bay before returning back to the paddocks, this will hopefully reduce any unnecessary running around, reducing the risk of any injury or stress.

We are very conscious here not to put any animal under any unnecessary stress and are very keen to make the experience for the alpacas as comfortable as possible and obviously a bit easier for us to manage.

The alpacas are all looking fantastic out in the paddocks and we are due for shearing on the 2nd June so getting the barn completed before then is the aim. Lisa assures me that I will have it finished!!

We have an alpaca that is coming up to 2 weeks over her due date this Thursday, so again we have been on constant look out trying to catch any sign of birthing, so we will keep you posted with the progress of Alice.

The Pedigree Ryeland sheep are now going up for sale, if any one is interested in a nice starter flock of 6 ewes with lambs at foot and a proven Pedigree Ryeland Ram then please feel free to get in touch.

Well that's it for now, more later with the progress of the barn and Alice.

1 comment:

  1. Good luck with your barn, as you say its so important to keep stress to the minimum.

    We have a system in our barn where we have interconecting stable like rooms, each one has four doors which can be opened into the connecting areas and the animals can be moved from area to area quite easily. We have a large holding area to start with and then can just split one girl off at a time into a stable to do the nessesary work and then back out into another holding area or another stable if we need to do more (ie: spit off, mating etc)

    This system works especially well if we need to do spit offs/matings with several females at a time as we can have more than one area to do matings.

    Took us ages to work out the system, but it seems to work really well. And when we are not using them as working areas we leave the interconnecting doors open and have feed troughs and hay inside so all the alpacas are used to coming into the area and are more than happy to come in.

    We have one stable kept for
    isolate any alpacas we can have a least a 12ft stable distance away from the herd, but they are still in sight and much less stress is put on the alpaca.

    Also really good for outside matings and bio-security, we can keep all the doors shut to one of the areas and just walk the stud in, the outside females does not come into contact with any of our alpacas.

    My husband wasnt impressed when I told him what I wanted, but we are very happy with the result.

    Good luck with yours, makes life so much easier for both you and the alpacas.

    Ginnie (sorry waffled a bit!!)

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