Have you ever had to work on a sick or injured alpaca? They don't much care for it, do they? I and several of my breeder friends and neighbors made a wonderful discovery last fall and I'd like to share it with you. Alpaca Tipping - yep, it is what it sounds like. Tipping...or causing the alpaca to lay still on its side...while you do what you need to do. I've tried it with 3 females - 2 pregnant and one immediately post partum. It worked with 2 of them, the other was having none of it. I'll start with the happy accident that first introduced me to this little trick. I had two females that went into labor at the same time. I have the great good fortune of living in an active alpaca community and I have 2 neighbors that are always on cria watch the same time I am. It is understood - if a baby is being born everyone comes running. So I did have other folks around, but two deliveries minutes apart presents its own set of problems and we decided to place both mothers in one enclosure so we could monitor things better. Now, bear in mind, one female is medium brown and one is snow white - both bred to the same male - but still, I was expecting different looking babies from the two dams. The white female did not have an easy time of it - labor was prolonged and difficult. The brown female's cria was much smaller and delivered pretty quickly. She was up and nursing within minutes of being born. The white female finally delivered, but she was down and catatonic. So I had two beautiful white cria - one male, one female - born minutes apart - and two post partum dams - one up and happily nurturing her new baby and one down for the count. Of course, all of our attention was on the downed animal. We did all the things you do, calcium, alfalfa. poking, prodding, pleading and praying. She rallied a couple of times, but it took a while to really get her to focus on the situation at hand, but she finally started to come around. Wouldn't you know it, the minute she perked up and looked around for her baby - the wrong cria walked right in front of her. She zeroed in on that cria and would pay no attention to her own. Of course, we immediately removed the other female and her cria from the stall and introduced her cria to her. We placed him right next to her, she sniffed him, but then looked away...looking for HER baby.