Sad Day on the Farm

We knew it would happen eventually, but this happened way too soon. We lost an alpaca last night. Bravo, our new Suri boy, who just got here on Saturday, died last night. He didn't show any signs of being ill. When I went to check on them after dinner last night, he was out in the field and couldn't get up. Chet carried him back to the barn, but it was too late.

Then I did something I never in the million years thought I would do. We took his body to a taxidermist and we are having his pelt preserved. There aren't an awful lot of options when livestock becomes deadstock. You can't reallly bury them as it's against the law in most places. Some people will leave them for the predators to finish off, but we didn't want to have that happen around here. There are rendering plants, I guess, but I didn't really want to consider that. The other option was take him to a landfill, which I thought is the worst of all the possibilities.

Besides the sadness of losing an animal, we're feeling pretty badly that the little deaf boy, Frankie, has lost his hearing ear guide. The breeder has generously offered to replace him with another animal that looks just like him so that Frankie will have another Suri to hang out with.