Familiarizing Alpacas with Halters

Video Transcript

"Okay, what we do with halter training is we start them out when they're about two months old, where we just put the halters on them, and we do that for a few days so that they get accustomed to having that halter on their muzzle. And just a couple minutes, too. It's not a long period of time. None of halter training lasts for very long. And then, what we do is, we take them, the babies out with their moms, and walk their moms with the babies, and the babies want to be with their moms, so they'll follow along and that way they get used to the halter, the lead and a person walking next to them and giving them commands. And then after they have that done, and actually Evita was very very easy to halter train, after that though we may take them with another Alpaca their age, that is more advanced in being halter trained, and walk with them. And then after they get that down, she's nibbling at me, after they get that down, we take them out alone and halter train, and walk them. And we walk and they walk next to us. We always walk with them on our right, and this is it right here, we use a loose lead so there's no pulling, no force at all. It's all where they're learning what we want, and we're going back to that trust factor again. They trust us and they know we're not going to take them places or do things to them that would hurt them. Another thing we try to do is we take them to as many new places as possible when we're halter training, so that they don't get alarmed when something different happens in this process. We'll take them all through the pastures and walk them on the pastures, different directions. We'll take them on the road and walk them in different directions. We'll even take them in the house and walk them around the house to see just different surroundings. We train them to walk into a trailer and just walk out of a trailer so that they have all these different experiences that give them more comfort and more self-assurance in life surrounding them. The real purpose of halter training, actually, is to calm them down. Sometimes, we, you'll learn later, is that we weigh them every month, and putting the halter on them tells them right away, "they want something out of us, and we will comply," and they will comply. That halter teaches them something of our relationship. I don't know exactly what it is, but having that halter on them modifies their behavior and calms them down. "