This lovely white female alpaca was born at Snowshoe Farm on June 11. She weighed a bit over 13 lbs. Her gestation was a few days less than 11 months and she presented as just slightly premature. She was up and about and nursing from her mother within no time. All in all, a textbook birth and everything seemed to be fine.
We try not to interfere a lot between a mother and her new cria, but we do watch closely and we do what we can to measure the cria’s progress. That includes getting a birth weight as soon as the cria is dry and weighing every day to be sure the cria is getting sufficient nutrition. We’re not alarmed if a cria loses a bit of weight for a day or two, but longer than that and we become concerned. Even though this little girl seemed to be nursing regularly she was losing weight every day.
So what’s the problem? Did the mother have enough milk? She has a large udder and we can express milk from every teat. But as we watched closely, we could see that this cria was not an aggressive nurser; she barely opened her mouth and spent most of her time just poking around her dam’s udder. She seemed to have a good sucking reflex when we poked a finger in her mouth, but she was not using it!
Our first goal, at that point, became getting some nutrition into her to help her put on weight and gain strength. We tubed milk into her several times on the next couple days, but not enough to fill her up. Rule of thumb is to feed a cria 10-15% of its body weight. We fed her less in the hopes that she would still be hungry and would continue to nurse. We were sure this would be a short-term issue and she would soon get the hang of nursing.
Well, she gained weight for a few days, but then leveled off and stopped gaining. We hesitate to tube repeatedly and decided that maybe we could help her learn to nurse better by supplementing her with a bottle. By this time I gave in and purchased a bag of kid milk replacer (this is meant to bottle feed baby goats). So we started bottle feeding her with the same strategy – we tried to give her enough to gain weight, but still stay hungry enough to feed from her mother. This made no real difference in her weight.
So we started to worry about what might be wrong with her. Our first thoughts were possible respiratory infection or a heart problem. While she was not what we’d call lethargic, she was not very active, either. The vet came out, checked her over and found no obvious problems. That was about all he could do without doing a blood test. So the decision at that point was to up her milk intake and see what happens within a week or so.
So now we’re bottle feeding her about every hour. Sometimes she takes two or three ounces. Sometime we struggle to get an ounce into her. At the same time, she is continuing to nurse from her dam. She gains weight some days and not on others. She has not lost more weight, but still weighs less than the day she was born. We have more ideas for adding nutrition and calories to her milk that we will be trying this week. We’re cautiously optimistic that she’ll be fine.
In 14 years of raising alpacas, this is not a situation we’ve seen before. We’ve actually been lucky and have had to resort to bottle feeding on very few occasions. We still hope that this will be temporary and she will soon get all her nutrition from her dam. We’ll see.
In the meantime, we’ve named this little girl Snowshoe Anahita. This is an old Persian name for a goddess who is associated with fertility, healing and wisdom. The goddess Anahita is also associated with the planet Venus, which is the cria’s mother’s name.