Heat stress and downer alpacas

Heat stress on our alpacas is something we are very aware of here in the desert Southwest. When temperatures in the summer time average over 100 degrees and can get well into the teens finding ways to keep cool has become an obsession. We have fans and swamp coolers going 24/7 on the barn. We place buckets of water in front of the coolers which provides the alpacas with cool drinking water even at the hottest part of the day.
Even so, occasionally an alpacas body temperature will climb for whatever reason, and when it goes way off kilter, they lose the ability to self regulate for a while. Also when their bodies reach an extremely high temperature for any period of time, a certain enzyme is release which causes muscle pain and weakness (think how achy you feel when you have the flu). The alpacas kush in response to this and often are not only unwilling, but unable to rise. Linda, our vet, believes that we lose more of the alpacas to complications that set in because they are down and cannot rise for such a long period of time than due to the initial heat stress that started the whole ball rolling in the first place.
Last summer she had us build her a walk in tub to treat one of her alpacas that had gone down to heat. It cooled the animal rapidly and allowed him to ease aching muscles and get his weight up off his legs. This helped get the stain off him and allowed him to lightly exercise his muscles while he was ill. The tub was big, ugly and leaked like sieve, but it did what it was designed to do and Luc pulled through.
After seeing what worked and didn’t work on that tub, Brian and his dad built a second one. Since we had more time to dedicate to this one, it came out much nicer. We even had it fiber-glassed to make it water tight. Then the tub was rolled away into the shop and forgotten about. Until this past Sunday, that is.
I went out to feed and check on the alpacas and found Jack down and not behaving like his normal self. I quickly checked his temperature and was shocked to see a reading of 106.9. Brian immediately rolled the tub over and we got him into it. Since the water coming out of our tabs is pretty warm in the summer, we added several frozen milk jugs into the tub. We got his temperature down and set him up in the section of the barn that remained the coolest, right in front of the swamp cooler vent.

We monitored his temperature closely and every time it approached 104, we got him back into the tub. We also started him on Naxcel as a preventative in case there was an infection of some sort that started the fever going. Jack never minded going into the tub, and a big bucket of hay kept him content enough for the 30 or so minutes we would have him in there. We began to notice that his body temperature was staying lower for longer after each bath. By Wednesday, his temperature was staying in a normal range without the aid of the Paca-spa, as we are now calling the tub. Thursday evening, we let him back in with his buddies. We’re still monitoring his temperature throughout the day and at any sign of a fever, we’ll get right back into our routine, but it seems the Paca-spa has once again done its job. I’m convinced it save Jack a world of hurt, if it hasn’t in fact saved his life. As far as I’m concerned, that spa is worth its weight in gold!

time goes by

So it’s been a while since I’ve up dated the blog. We’ve been pretty busy. We’ve completed both the Show Low Days and The Northern AZ Arts shows. We had a great time at booth, and now we’re completely pooped. Brian and I decided to take this past weekend off and just relax. We took in a movie in Casa Grande. Had a bit of a hick-up when I tried to use AMC passes at a Harkins theater. Oopsie. Well that did explain the odd look I got as I handed the passes through the window.
June was really hot and July is shaping up to be more of the same. The swamp coolers have been going 24/7 for a while now. I know they are providing some relief as I’ll come home in the afternoon, and you wouldn’t know there was an alpaca on the place. They are all in the barns letting the cool air (ok, so it’s still 90 degrees, but it’s cool relative to the outside temp.) flow over them. Those big swamp coolers are a god send. We still go out and hose the ‘pacas of once or twice a day to help cool them, though I’m not sure how helpful it really is since the critters run right out into the sun to bake after they get their bellies wet.
Only another 8 weeks or so till cooler weather! Fall is right around the corner.

A pretty, gery box

Swamp coolers, while being very effective in our dry desert heat, are not really very attractive. The new swamp cooler on the barn is basically a big grey metal box.
My father in law decided that this just would not do, and dressed it up a bit.
Now we have the only alpaca weathervane in the State of Arizona that I know of. It can tell us from what direction the 110 degree heat will be blowing in from this weekend. Yeehaa.
Not that I’ll be here for the 110. I’m headed up to the high country for Show Low Days this weekend.

Good bye Miss B

Sometimes you need a little time and space away from and event to gain some prospective on it. We lost Miss B a couple of weeks ago and I only now feel up to writing about it. It happened suddenly, she was sick when I got up on a Saturday morning and by Sunday afternoon she was gone.
I could shake my fist at the universe and rally about how unfair life is, and in truth, I did indulge in some of that, but it neither made me feel better nor brought Miss B back. And I’m not one to waste a lot of time on fruitless endeavors. I’ve been engaging in alpaca therapy instead. The herd still wants to be fed and the poo still needs to be cleaned up, and spending time amongst the animals with their calming influence has help considerably. I still miss B terribly, but now I can honestly be thankful for the six weeks we got enjoy her. And what a joy she was, that little girl never stopped moving and would often leap into the air just for the sheer joy of doing it.
Rest in peace Miss B, and thank you for your gift.

Seriously, Monday again???!!!

Monday; day three: toasted another fan. Had a rock hit the wind sheild on the van on my way to Maynard's Market in Tucson. I now have a big 2' crack across the passenger side.

It's not all bad, this morning my mother-in-law let me know that my FIL has repaired the two fans. Any bets on how long it will take for me to kill them again?

And we did ultra sounds on the girls yesterday. Three out of four confirmed pregnant. The fourth is still determined to keep us guessing.

Monday... again

Do you ever get the feeling every day is Monday? I seem to be in a groundhog loop of Mondays. Yesterday (which actually was Monday) I got home to find that the second swamp cooler had once again blown a motor. I got a fan out of the shop so the boys could at least have some air circulating, which they managed to knock over through the gate and the motor on that heated up and stopped working by the time I found it.
This morning, as I was headed out for work, the sensor in my van said “check right front tire, pressure 25) Well ok, I drove over to the shop took about fifteen minutes to figure out how to work the air compressor and then started filling the tire. The sensor never moved from 25 psi. What the heck? So I put more air in the tire (you can probably see where this is going). I finally said the heck with this the sensor is bad, got in my van and headed into work.
About thirty miles from anywhere, the oil light came on. Ugh! Well all right, not much I can do about it now. When I get to the next gas station I’ll get a quart of oil and add it in. Ironically, I have an appointment to change the oil first thing in the morning.
Now I start mess with the sensors and scrolling through to see what else is falling apart. Right front tire still says 25 psi. Rear right tire now says 83 psi. WTF!!!!!! A sneaking suspicion starts to come over me. When I finally get to the office (with my newly acquired quart of oil) I start digging around the van for a tire gauge. Why I didn’t use the tire gauge in the first place and relied on those stupid sensors is beyond me, won’t make that mistake again. I check the pressure of the rear tire; sure enough: 25 psi. I check the front, and the tire gauge maxes out (its limit is 75 psi, so what do you think the pressure was? Anyone want to guess 83 psi???!!!) The sensor on the tire is reversed. The front is actually the rear and vice verse.
So it’s seven a.m., I’ve got the front tire pressure back down, the back will just have to wait until I get home, and I’m just waiting to see what else can go wrong this morning…..

Happy May!

Wednesday tends to be fiber day at Alpacazona Farm. Linda comes out if she is available and we spend the entire morning washing, picking, tumbling and carding fiber. After she leaves I usually try to keep at one fiber project or another. Last Wednesday was a dying fiesta. I hand painted over a dozen skeins of yarn, some hand spun some commercial. I love to just see the wild tumble of colors.
On other news, we’ve been really working with Kinesis. Back in January her demeanor changed, which we were expecting because we thought she was pregnant and due soon. Well she wasn’t and we should have seen the change for the warning sign that it was. She started to get pretty skinny and when she was shorn, we were shocked at the extent of the weight loss. I spent a good deal of time beating myself up for having let it get as bad as it has. But self recrimination does little to fix a problem so I went to work getting weight back on that poor girl. After week of paying very close attention the amount and verity of food Kinesis is taking in, I’m beginning to see progress. I haven’t weighed her in a week (another Wednesday chore) but I am beginning to see a marked improvement in her activity level. The guys at work have joined the “Feed Kinesis” band wagon have been bring in veggies and greens from their gardens to give her to keep enticing her to eat. Of course this may all back fire as she gets use to eating treats and will decide she doesn’t need hay anymore!
We had a horrible wind storm over the weekend. I hate wind. I really, really, really hate wind. I’ll be spending the next two evenings picking up all the trash that has blown into the yard and been caught up in the fences. I hate wind.
In the middle of the wind storm, we dragged out the old swamp cooler and started getting it cleaned up. We’re going to replace the smaller dead cooler with this big old monster. The thin has been sitting out in back of Brian’s folk’s property for years and is ugly as hell, but to my surprise the motor started right up when we plugged it in (ok, not right up, the capacitor needs to be replaced, but the motor still runs!) We’ll seal the bottom up; add a new water pump and presto! Cool air for the alpacas. And just in the nick of time, we’re headed for the nineties this week and I’ve a feeling they may be here for awhile.
Finally, we have three boarders arriving this week. We’ll be moving animals around once we see how personalities mesh. It’s always exciting for the first couple of days as pecking orders need to be re-worked.
Well that’s it for now.