The day all the nice fluffy alpacas turn into funny looking four-legged q-tips. I can't possibly include all the shearing pictures, but if you click on the slide-show to the right, you can see more. Sorry, they are not labeled (yet) but they're there.
I arrived on the farm early in the morning where Cindy and the others had been busy at work setting up. The first group of alpacas had been corralled into a small pen, the scale had been set up, shots prepared, and the shearers were setting up camp under one of the shelters with a tarp for a floor. A box of zip-lock bags had been meticulously labeled with each alpacas name for samples to be sent away for micron counting, and large garbage bags had been labeled with each alpacas name for their coats, as well as generic bags ("brown Suri", "white Huacaya") for seconds. Another box of garbage bags had been split down every seem for rolling the fleeces in plastic.
My first order of business was to help put harnesses on all the caught alpacas, then we trimmed their bangs a little and weighed them. We tried various methods of blowing some of the veggie mater off of the animals, but they weren't too keen about that idea and we eventually gave up, though they did get a little brushing to get the worst off.
The idea is to always start with lightest fiber and work our way darker, but in this case, it was more personality based - the lightest colored alpaca happened to be a partly blind baby boy... so he wasn't about to be released into the big field on his own. An alpaca was chosen to go first and lead over to the sheering area where the two men in charge of the sheering lay her down on her side, connected her front and hind legs to ropes, and began sheering with one of them always holding her head.
The first cut was a small sample of fiber off her side to be sent away for testing. Then the main sheering began. One of those cut open plastic bags was put down and each side of her fleece was carefully rolled up in the plastic before being put in a labeled plastic bag.
Cindy was busy making sure each alpaca got their shots and their nails trimmed.
The seconds (okay but not great parts of the fleece) were put in the generic bags, and the thirds (short dirty bad parts) were put in a big bucket for garbage. Between every animal all of the fiber had to be cleaned up carefully to avoid mixing one fleece with the next, or getting thirds in with the next animals firsts.
Some of the alpacas had been holding their pee or poop and when they became stressed out during shearing, out it all came! Some good CNA like person then needed to sit there with a rag to keep it from getting on the fleece. We ended up going through a lot of towels this way.
Occasionally there was an alpaca determined to spit, one of which was so bad she needed a sock over her face so the sheerers could work. (They do this to people in the hospital too - never spit on your nurse or you'll get a sock over your head.)
While we had them all tied up, we checked their teeth, and the ones that needed dental work got their teeth carefully filed down.
To release the alpacas, the sheerer would hold them in a special way while his partner untied.
Once the sheering was done, we would either make a human hallway and set the alpaca free to run to the pasture, or we would put the harness back on and lead them there. Most of the alpacas were very comfortable being lead and stayed calmer while they waited to be sheered if I lead them back and forth around the yard, but some of the alpacas were not good with their harnesses at all yet and so rather than nicely being lead to the sheering, we let them out and used the large number of people to corral them towards the sheering tent.
The alpacas seemed very happy to lay in the sun with their new doos, and got some funny looks from the alpacas who hadn't been sheered yet.
Having the alpacas in this very controlled position gave me the opportunity to learn a little more about alpaca anatomy. They have these very funny scent glands on their legs that get filled with something that looks like flaky, crusty, dry butter. Evidently this is normal and important and should not be removed, according to the sheerer who asked the vet.
They also have funny callosus on their chest bones from laying on the ground. (Head is on the right.)
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