Suicidal alpaca

Bert attempted to hang herself early this morning.  There must have been some bailer twine left in the barn last night after we filled the feeder and we missed it in the dark.  Sam went over and found her with it looped over her neck and with her foot on the other end.  He tried to catch her and she panicked a bit; luckily this caused the loop to slip down over her tummy and he managed to extricate her.

After that drama we moved on to the next crisis - Little Star has virtually stopped taking her bottle.  Yesterday she was down from one and a half litres a day to around 600ml and today she has only had 300ml with only a couple of feeds to go.  Her last Nuflor injection was this morning and up to the day before yesterday she was looking normal.  Today she has started sucking on Bert’s leg again - when she is ill she always goes to her Mum and sucks on the inner thigh.  It must be a comfort thing where Bert can’t feed her.  Bert just stands there as if Little Star was feeding.  Carl says not to panic until tomorrow so we’ll just have to see.

The new feeder is in place and it is wonderful.  This is a picture of the feeder in use before all the drama started.  Mind you, I have just seen a picture of one hand crafted by the Chippy on the Island and that is a real work of art!  Bert is the one lying all on her own in the background, shortly before her suicide attempt, and Little Star is with me - it was a wet night and morning!  I also have a feeling I have resized the picture a little oddly as I am sure they look longer than they should be!!

Carl and Sam are a little overexcited at the moment because a very special thing is happening in a couple of weeks.  I’ll save that news until later but it does mean that they are both a little silly at times and Carl is annoying me by calling me bonkers every five minutes and it is all because of an idea I had which I thought was reasonable.  He was literally rolling around on the carpet in hysterics last night after I explained my perfectly reasonable suggestion to the BAS that if anyone did not want to go to shows for halter classes in the current climate there could be a sort of accreditation scheme for you to gain alpaca stars for any alpacas you owned who could be classed as elite.  There could be a sort of roving judge to determine degrees of ‘eliteness’.  I confess I did elaborate on this a little further and it did get a bit surreal.  I am now mortified that I actually sent this inane suggestion to the BAS and feel I am now going to have to consider renaming our herd to avoid the derision of the BAS board!  Carl seemed to think I meant that it would be like an alpaca show with the judge travelling to each farm - which I didn’t mean, that would be ridiculous, and would take years to judge a class.  I have visions of an elderly alpaca judge roaming the country searching for the final alpaca in the junior white male class!

Anyway, back to reality and down to 15 eggs today.  I think that is due to the fact that the new ex battery hens are spending a lot of their time squaring up to the old ex battery hens through the wire.  We had to create an extension for them today as I tried letting them out and they mobbed the cockerel and pulled all his tail feathers out.  He retreated to the top of the water feeder and sulked.  The weedy bald hen is the worst!

This Saturday we are off to Wellground to have a rummage with Les and Baby Oil Man and that is something which will, no doubt, fire us up again and give us lots to think about. I am longing to see Banksy and Imprint in the flesh and have a feeling I will be immensely jealous.  Probably won’t be able to get away with smuggling them out in the back of the Daihatsu!

This entry was posted on 27/10/2009 at 08:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.