Dolly and Willie

It feels like every other post I write is about the alpacas, and too many of them involve a death.  Unfortunately, this is no exception - although there is a difference this time, a hopefully positive twist to the usual story...  

On Monday morning, I happened to be watching while Caleb moved the animals on the far hillside, and noticed that, up at the top under a tree, there was a white alpaca-shape flopping around.  They like to roll like dogs or horses, so I didn't think much of it, and then the rest of the animals ran into the new pasture - and the shape continued to flop and then lie still.  It turned out to be Dolly, and she was choking.  It was tracheal, so she was having breathing trouble, not choking on food in her esophagus.  We brought her back to the house, and tubed her to be sure - sure enough, it went right down and didn't change anything, so we gave her banamine to relax her and the throat muscles, and called the vet.  He said to give her Dexamethazone for edema, so I did that.  As I finished, I realized that although she was laid out like dead in the truck bed, she was chewing her cud!  I made her sit up - she didn't want to - and once she was up, she decided it wasn't that bad after all, and remained seated in the truck bed the rest of the morning, calmly eating and drinking.  I don't know what fixed the throat issue (I think she was actually recovered before I administered the Dexamethazone), or what caused it, but she appeared to be fine so we put her back in the pasture at lunch - it's not good to separate alpacas from each other for very long, and little Willie is hers.  By supper, she was laid out again, looking dead, so we brought her and Willie back to the corral in the yard, where she revived and sat eating and drinking.  They spent Tuesday there - Dolly never stood again, stopped eating or drinking, and died that afternoon.  We really don't know what was wrong - was the tracheal swelling related, or just coincidental to something else?  Regardless, I did a lot of online research, and we've decided to separate them all from the main herd. I think the goats are a poor companion animal for the pacas - alpacas use a single "midden" poop pile, while goats sprinkle everywhere.  This means that pacas are used to eating in a clean pasture, but the goats contaminate everything there and the alpacas can't avoid ingesting worms they aren't acccustomed to dealing with.  Goats themselves have a similar mechanism for avoiding intestinal parasites - they naturally browse brush, higher up, rather than short grass, where the worms are, so when forced to eat only short grass, their system is short-circuited and their worm-load increases.  Our long-rest grazing works well for the goats - our grass-lespedeza mix is often 3' tall when they reach it, so they have the option of only eating higher browse.  The alpacas prefer the short grass, though, like sheep and cows, and therefore ingest the parasites from the goats.  This weekend, we're going to put the paca herd into rotation in front of the milk goats - the pacas don't actually eat much, and with their central midden, the milkers will still be getting an almost unused pasture by following them.  We're also going to start giving the alpacas copper boluses - pills full of bits of copper wire that stick throughout their gut and slowly leach copper, which deters the parasites.  We've been giving theses to the goats for a while now, but think the pacas would benefit as well.  

Now to the hopefully brighter side - after another not-so-great development.  We brought Willie back to the house with Dolly to keep them together, but noticed in the process that he was way too easy to catch.  We dosed them both with iron for anemia, power punch for vitamins, Ivermectin for worms, and thiamine because they can always use a booster.  After Dolly died, I started bottle-feeding Willie with goat milk.  When I took him the second bottle, I notice a wet-looking spot on his side and figured he'd laid down in some poop.  I took a closer look - nope, his fleece was damp from (sensitive stomach alert) literally dripping maggots, the little tiny ones just seething by the thousands.  I pulled apart the fur just enough to see that there was a huge wad of them in some kind of wound, and called the vet.  He said to clean it out with flea shampoo and hydrogen peroxide.  I tied up poor Willie, had Liam hold the rope, and went to work with the scissors.  Once I got the fleece cut out, I saw the actual injury - a gaping hole at least 2" across, with (Queasy warning here, skip ahead if you have a sensitive stomach) 1/2" maggots everywhere in addition to literally thousands of small ones.  I dropped everything, called the vet back and said it was not a job for me!  I took Willie down there that evening, and the vet cleaned it up.  His opinion is a puncture wound - maybe tree branch, not cow or goat horn.  The wound was a good 2" across and at least that deep - I couldn't believe it hadn't compromised him internally.  We've kept Willie in the yard with Annie (little Tammy's mom) for company - alpacas are very social animals, and while Annie is now pacing the fence and crying all day, she's healthy and can take it - I was worried about Willie.  After being separated from the other pacas for several days, he was silent, no crying or anything.  After having Annie with him in the yard for a day, he seems much happier - at her expense, granted, but he's the one in danger!  In just 2 days, he's improved noticably.

I feel awful that he could have had a wound like that, and it get in that condition without us knowing, but honestly, even if we'd had daily contact with him I don't think we would've seen anything until the point we did.  We'd been handling him for several days at that point, and still never saw it.  There's just so much fleece that the hole was entirely hidden until the maggots made themselves apparent :(  I think his prognosis is pretty good, his hole looks much better, probably half as deep already, and he's happily taking 3 bottles of goat milk a day (after I catch him, another good sign!)  I wish I had some sheep milk, it's apparently closer to alpaca than anything else, even goat milk - but more on that next time :)