October 6, 2008

Alpacas I Have Known

Last weekend I sang and played my guitar at an Alpaca Open House in Indiana. It was at Honey’s Alpaca Ranch, owned by my cousin Heide and her husband Kurt, not too far from Indianapolis.

Alpacas make a better audience than you might think. They are not real big on applause, probably because they only have two toes, but at least they don’t stand in front of you having shouted conversations with each other while you’re playing. And all in all, they seemed appreciative.

But then I may be taking too much credit. When I first plugged in the guitar microphone and got a blast of feedback, they charged the stage like a herd of fans at a Hannah Montana concert.

I guess calling it an Alpaca Open House was a little misleading, though, since it turns out that the open house was not actually intended for the alpacas – they just happened to live where I was playing. The open house was apparently set up for a bunch of people who had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than drive out to look at alpacas. And maybe hear a little music.

Alpacas really are pretty interesting animals, and I know a lot more about them now than I did a couple of weeks ago. They are kind of like llamas, only they’re smaller, they have softer fur, and they have owners who get kind of testy when you call them llamas.

They keep the males and females in separate pens, divided by a fence – which seems like a pretty good idea in general if you stop and think about it. I mean, think how much simpler a man’s life would be if all the women were kept on the other side of a good stout partition.

All things considered, life seems to be pretty straightforward for an alpaca. The females basically just wander around all day eating grass, pooping little black pellets, getting their fur sheared off, and occasionally popping out a baby alpaca. The males spend their days demonstrating to each other what they would be doing if they could just get over to the other side of that good stout partition.

I’m not sure I care to know what they do at night.

There are a number of things about raising alpacas that are a little bit unusual. For instance, I had an opportunity to go alpaca shopping with Heide and Kurt, who were looking to buy a breeding male.

Understand that I am by no means a farmer, and I had never really given much thought as to what we would be looking for in a breeding male alpaca. Nice fur (alpaca ranchers call it “fiber”) I suppose, or good teeth, or maybe the alpaca equivalent of “bedroom eyes.” So I guess I expected the process to go pretty much like you see when somebody buys a horse on television – pat it on the back, stick your fingers in the mouth, gaze into the eyes and fork over the cash.

What I did not expect was for Kurt to walk right up behind the first prospective alpaca Romeo, who was standing calmly and gazing off into the distance, and grab it by the testicles.

Now I admit that I don’t have a lot of direct experience here, but I would have assumed that just about every male, regardless of species, would prefer to avoid getting grabbed by the testicles. Especially by a stranger.

And yes, I suppose there might a few exceptions to that – after all, it takes all kinds. I guess my real point is, you would think that being grabbed by the testicles is a thing that it would be pretty hard to be neutral about.

But that is exactly how that alpaca treated the situation. He simply gazed over his shoulder as if to say. “Oh, hello there. I’m Doug. Happy to meet you. Will you be buying me then? And if not, would you be so kind as to open the gate over there, the one that leads to the girls’ pen?”

Kurt then offered Doug’s testicles to Heide, who squeezed them and nodded approvingly. When she offered them to me, I said, “No, thanks anyway. I’m good.”

We didn’t buy Doug, at least not that day, and after an hour or so I completely lost track of the alpacas we groped. Each time we got the same indifferent response from the gropees, and we ended up leaving, literally if not metaphorically, empty-handed.

Next week – I Don’t Know Nothing About Birthing No Alpacas!

Copyright ©2008 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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