Today's blog we're going to talk to you about registering a cria, or a young alpaca. You can also watch the video here on our YouTube channel.
This is Amelia she was born in June 2020 and we're going to be registering her with BAS or The British Alpaca Society.
The reason we will be registering her is we want to be able to use her for breeding so having her registered will mean we can trace all of her family, so mum Ambition and all her family are on there, in future we can see what colours have been in that heritage line so we can look at potential genetic matches or qualities of progeny. From a society point of view if there's ever a health issue they can get in touch with everybody, they know where the animals are and who they're linked to.
When you're on the form and you you come to register an alpaca with BAS there's a few bits of basic information that you'll need to put in there:
you'll have your herd number which for us is CND for Candleford, Candleford alpacas
you'll need to know if they are male or female, obviously Amelia is female
they have a an ear tag number
they have a microchip number and the microchip goes at the bottom of their left ear. Our vet came over a few weeks ago to do that bit for us
you also need their colour.
We will do a separate video and blog on the recognised colours of alpaca fleece, but there are handy guides that you can buy from The BAS which give you all the main colors and they're the ones that we're going to choose from to be able to register Amelia.
The colour of an alpaca is determined by the color of the fleece closest to the skin as this removes any errors from bleaching with the sun or anything else that could affect the fleece colour. If you look at the ends of her fleece next to the colour card, she's just muddy so we need to part the fleece and look at the colour closest to the skin.
When we part that you can see there's a tide mark where all the mud is and then this nice white fleece down at the bottom so what we're going to do is put the card against against her fleece down at the bottom and we can see she's white.
So next we'll go pop all that information on the forms and we'll go from there.
I hope that was useful, if you want to find out more just send us a message.