Tying up thick fringes - "My Suri can't see!"

We have noticed, from time to time, that some of our full fleeced Suri alpacas can begin to have problems seeing properly because of their very thick and long fringes.  I have successfully used hair ties to tie up long thick fringes, allowing the alpaca to see clearly again. Obviously we could just cut the fringe which is what we do once the show season is finished, but in the mean time our heavily fleeced show team can be seen wearing hair ties at home and then we take them out at show time.

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Mating a Full Fleeced Suri

When we have had to mate girls who are heavily fleeced e.g. a female who was not shorn for showing purposes, I have had great success using hair ties to tie up the fleece on either side of their tail as well as using a couple of ties on the tail itself.  This stops the male’s penis from getting tangled in her fleece while he is getting into position.  This little tip has been a huge winner so far.   Until I started tying up their fleece, I had a lot of problems with the whole mating process to the point that the male just gave up trying to mate one of the girls.

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Mating a “Low” Sitting Female

We have a couple of females that seem to flatten themselves onto the ground, making it hard for our new male to get into the correct position to mate them, so I bought a couple of cheap lumber foam cushions and I wedged them under the girls back legs, effectively lifting them up higher off the ground.  This works really well giving the male easy access to the girl he is mating.  I usually remove the cushions once the male has settled into his task so that they do not get in the way of procceedings.

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The information presented here is from our own experiences, adapted from others to suit our situation, property and our animals. We don’t claim to be experts and you are welcome to disagree, if you find something useful – great. Everyone is welcome to comment and provide feedback – see Contact Us.