Shearing Day 2024

The alpacas get their annual spa day

Today the alpacas got their big annual buzzcut. Shearing is an essential part of alpaca healthcare. Alpacas are highly efficient hay-to-fuzz pipelines, but if their fleece is left to grow for too long, the animals are at risk of heatstoke. Due to a fluke of scheduling and last year’s rainy summer, our alpacas are getting sheared almost two months earlier than last year, but even with less time between haircuts, they still have two to three inches of fleece growing on their backs. During shearing, the alpacas also get their toenails trimmed, teeth filed down as needed, vaccines, and a treatment to protect against ear mites. It’s a full-service spa day.

Many of the bigger alpaca farms do their own shearing. One of our early experiences handling shearing was volunteering to help with a shearing day at a big ranch. It was a valuable learning experience and a chance for us to test if we were comfortable working with alpacas before we took the leap into assembling our own herd.

Alpacas have fragile skin under all that fleece. They also do not like to be touched. Because of these factors, alpacas are restrained for shearing, with cuffs around their front and back feet. They are stretched out on a mat and gently rolled as their torsos receive a buzz cut. It looks awful, but it does not hurt the alpaca. They kind of protest, but after 5-10 minutes of restraint, they feel much cooler and happier. Shearing them this way takes a decent amount of equipment and setup, so we have a shearing crew come to us rather than do the process ourselves. We use TopKnot Alpaca Care, a company specializing in gentle shearing and alpaca healthcare.

Ready to see their transformations?

Before

Once again, Moira was the biggest drama queen, making a fuss the entire time she was getting her haircut. The other girls are very chill by comparison. Moira, however, produced the biggest blanket of fleece by far at 3.6 lbs of fiber.

We got a fly treatment for Luna to try to prevent the bites she had last year and the guys trimmed back her overgrown footpads a bit. I thought that because Luna is a little peanut, that extra-fluffy Nell might produce more fleece than her. That ended up being accurate. Nell produced 2 lbs in her blanket which was almost as much as her mother, Theodra, at 2.4 lbs. Luna produced 1.8 lbs.

Because Nell hasn’t been weaned yet, the crew left her head and tail as-is. When crias nurse, their moms smell their tops and tails, so leaving those areas fuzzy helps preserve that mama-baby bond. We are expecting Nell to wean soon, but she still gets to look like a Q-tip for a bit.

After

Which makeover is your favorite? I squealed so loud when I saw Nell that I scared Julio and one of the shearers.

My mom and sibling are here, so not only were they very helpful with dog and daughter wrangling during shearing day, but they got to see the drama for themselves!