Buying Bad

No offense intended to Breaking Bad but in the Alpaca business buying bad can be just as dangerous as well as expensive.

A friend of mine recently contacted me to tell me that she was planning a move to Oregon and wanted to buy some alpacas. The phrase that caught my eye was her grand children thought they were so "cute".

I've known more than one alpaca farmer that bought on emotion rather than on good common horse sense or should I say "Alpaca Sense".

Buying on emotion is almost always a sure case for disaster. I'm not saying that emotion shouldn't enter into the transaction. Let's face it, emotion enters into almost every transaction we are involved in whether it's buying a new car, a house, a diamond ring, art work, you name it. Emotion is always in the mix.

But you wouldn't buy a diamond ring with a huge flaw simply because you fell in love with the cut or the size or the color. You wouldn't buy a house with a defective plumbing system simply because you loved the neighborhood or the front yard or the old claw foot tub in the bathroom. And if you did buy these things you would surely be looking for a steep discount off the asking price. Maybe no one would notice the flaw in the diamond and maybe you could spend ten thousand or so to fix the plumbing system but it's a little different when you are buying alpacas or for that matter any livestock.

My wife and I were fortunate in that we came from an agriculture background and both of us had lots of experience working with animals. The first key to buying any animal is conformation. For those of you new to livestock, conformation, very simply, is what the animal looks like. A horse with a sway back isn't a good buy. If an animals ribs show prominently that isn't a good buy. If there is mucus running out of the eye or nose that is not a good buy. These are fairly easy to detect but conformation extends beyond what is readily visible. With Alpacas we look for how the animal stands and walks. We feel the animals bone structure (this requires some experience with alpacas since their "cute" fleece can hide bone defects), check their eyes, particularly the white of the eyes. Look at their teeth and mouth, check their fecal matter (another matter that requires some experience), and if possible any health records the seller has available. Some buyers even go to the expense of having a vet check the animal for problems (something I recommend unless you and the seller have a long standing relationship).

The second key to buying an animal is what do you plan to do with the animal. Are you going to show the animal in halter classes, show their fleece, breed them to animals in your herd only or offer breeding to other farmers? Or are they just going to be a hobby and provide fun and delight for you and your family?

Each one of these plans will require a certain amount of due diligence on your part to make sure the animal you are buying is suited to the task. One of the first animals we bought was an old neutered male. We weren't going to show him and he doesn't have the best fleece but he has a personality and we thought he might make a good PR animal. He's pretty good with people so we thought he might be a good one to take to farmers markets to let the kids pet and feed. We knew in advance what we wanted to do with Paladin (above) and that figured into the negotiations.

However, I've seen alpaca farmers buy on emotion and what the seller (horse trader) told them without seemingly any investigation at all. As an example, early on in our alpaca venture, even before we had purchased any alpacas, we attended a show to get an idea about what alpaca shows were all about. My wife was visiting with a well known and respected alpaca breeder when the breeder was asked to come look at an animal a farmer had just purchased a few weeks before the show. Apparently he had been told that he had a "show quality" animal and was very dismayed since the alpaca had not even placed in the event he entered it in. I was wandering around the show and happened to come upon my wife and the breeder examining the animal. I was probably fifty or sixty feet away when I first noticed them and my first thought was "Oh, I wonder what's wrong with that poor little Alpaca?" Even from that distance I could immediately tell that the animal was extremely small, looked somewhat ragged and just generally didn't have the "conformation" of a healthy animal. Later, the breeder confirmed that this farmer had unfortunately been the victim of an unscrupulous seller and had bought the proverbial "pig in a poke". They bought the sellers pitch hook, line and sinker. Having an experienced breeder examine the animal after the fact only added to the misery when the farmer was told what he didn't want to hear.

So what's the take-away here. Do your homework. Examine the animal. Take what the seller says with a grain of salt. Get an expert in to examine the alpaca BEFORE you spend that hard earned money.