10 Things You Didn’t Know About Alpacas
Sure, you know alpacas are cute. But here are 10 things we bet you didn’t know about our favorite South American camelids.
1) There are only two breeds, the huacaya (wuh-kai-ya), which has fluffy hair akin to a teddy bear, and the suri (pronounced like Katie Holmes’ daughter’s name), with long wavy hair that hangs off its body.
2) Like their cousins the llamas, alpacas spit when angry or annoyed. Faith Perkins, who owns Quarry Ridge Farm in Salem, New York, where she and her husband, Herb, have a herd of 25 huacayas, says the animals usually reserve this activity for each other when quarreling over food, but may let one fly in your direction if you happen to be giving them shots or trimming their nails.
3) Alpacas have soft pads on their feet, which don’t churn up the ground like a cow or horse’s hooves do.
4) When alpaca eat grass, they snip off the top of the plant unlike some other animals that pull the grass up by the root when eating. (Which is why they have a reputation for being good lawnmowers.)
5) They “cush” when seated, meaning they fold their legs under their body making them easy to transport in a smaller vehicle.
6) Alpacas’ tails are used to express feelings to each other. If they’re bothered by something they will twitch it back and forth. If an animal is being submissive it will raise its tail over its body and crouch down.
7) The animals have interesting pooping habits. “In the middle of the barn we have a box that looks almost like a kitty litter box but not as deep. They do all their business there,” says Perkins, who adds the behavior is “a throwback to their days in the high desert down in South America,” which allowed a stud to more easily determine which group of females was ready for breeding. The male would sniff out whether any of the ladies had high estrogen levels cluing him in on which group to check out for receptive females.
8) Mothers almost always have their babies in the morning. Perkins says this is also related to life in the high desert in South America where temperatures are very cold at night. By having their babies in the morning, the little ones will have the whole day to dry off, begin walking around, and nursing from the mother before the temperatures begin to drop.
9) Females have an 11-month gestation period and about 90 percent of the time don’t need help in the delivery of the babies. “They just go into labor and deliver the baby within an hour,” says Perkins.
10) Alpacas love to sunbathe. “You’ll come home and all the alpacas will be laying out in the field. They lie down on their sides, stretch out and soak up that sun,” says Perkins. She admits “it’s pretty scary if you don’t know what they’re doing” since they kind of look like they’ve dropped dead.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].10 Things You Didn’t Know About Alpacas
by Andrew Amelinckx, Modern Farmer
September 28, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Hi, curious… can alpaca be trained to drink water from an automatic watering post? If so, would they be able to operate paddle in bottom of bowl the same way a horse would or more like livestock (cattle/goats/sheep)? Thanks, Carole.