Becky and Al visited southern California last week. We decided that it might be worthwhile to consider adding some West Coast alpacas to our herd in order to expand and diversify our gene pool. While studying the pedigrees of our own (mostly Midwest) animals we noticed that East Coast animals, Mid West animals, and West Coast animals always tend to be bred with animals in their own regions. Thus the gene pools become localized with little opportunity for nature to select out the best genes. We’ve already acquired some East Coast animals (Belle and Electra). Now we are looking at the West Coast.
We visited several farms (The Alpacas at Windy Hill, Dry Creek Alpacas ) from San Diego to North of Los Angeles. There are some very nice animals there, particularly Monteggio of PVA at Dry Creek Alpacas. It struck me that the alpacas of Southern California live under some rather hash circumstances -dry, hot, brown, sandy, generally flat, and very little grass if any. Thus I would think that nature would have weeded out the weaker, less adaptable animals and what is left there must be strong, environmentally adaptable animals who would do well on our verdant, hilly farm with a variable climate more similar to what their ancestors were used to in South America.
While in California we were introduced to the controversy among Alpaca owners concerning the elitists who think only a Peruvian animal is top quality and Bolivian or Chilean animals are something less. I was not aware of this difference of opinion. And I don’t quite understand why it should be so. After all it only depends on “what side of the mountain” the animals lived. I don’t suppose the wild animals (before the Peruvians started their ranches) respected the various countries’ borders and only mated with alpacas on their side of the border! Furthermore, as I understand it, there was an active smuggling enterprise taking animals from Peru to Bolivia and Chile for sale during the period when Peru stopped exporting animals.
If any readers can educate me on the arguments from either side I would certainly appreciate hearing from them.