Educating others with facts is never an attack on those that proffer anecdotal folklore. And it is important to act in the best interests of Alpacas everywhere when confronting errors of fact. In order to do this, experience alone is not good enough. Expanding your knowledge base with camelid education so that you can give back to the Alpaca industry is vital! Quite honestly, that was one of the motivating factors for this series of articles.
Buy up-to-date texts as your primary source of information. Acknowledged as the best one available is:
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- “Llama and Alpaca Care–Medicine, Surgery, Reproduction, Nutrition and Herd Health”, by Cebra, Anderson, Tibary, Van Saun, Johnson.
This is a full fledged Veterinary text.
Other texts to consider are:
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- Alpaca Field Manual, 3rd edition / Norman Evans (out of print/buy used copies online)
- The Art and Science of Alpaca Judging
Take classes to learn more. In our Texas/Oklahoma area you will find that TXOLAN and Alpacas of Oklahoma offer reasonably priced classes on a number of topics.
There are some good online repositories to check out. Try looking at The International Alpaca Reference Library. It seems to be quite extensive.
You can also go to the Alpaca Owners Association’s website at: www.alpacainfo.com/learn and learn basic information on the Academy tab. Expect your mentor to be expanding their knowledge base as well.
An annual AOA Publication is helpful. While Aubrey Oaks Alpacas does not advertise in this publication we recommend it to you. This is the 2018 version of the Alpacas Owners Guide.
Take classes on neonatal, parasites, pasture improvements, etc.
Debbie has taken the 3-day Camelidynamics course and it has proven helpful.
Always seek to attend camelid education opportunities when they come up.
Finally, if you are in the business of selling Alpacas we encourage you to develop your own support pages as we have done. By documenting this information I’ve found that it has kept my thoughts and knowledge significantly more organized. Not only will you benefit your clients by providing them good training, you will also become much more conversant about the multitudinous details involved in raising Alpacas.
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