Preparing Alpacas for Shows

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jill Bergman and I'm going to show you the things that we do before we take an Alpaca to the show, to an Alpaca show. The first thing we have to do is make sure that they're halter trained. Make sure that they're comfortable going in and out of a halter, making sure that having this thing around their muzzle doesn't spook them out at all. Make sure that the halter fits that the halter sits high enough up on the nose so it doesn't block any of their breathing passages. And halter training can actually take anywhere from a month, to a few months, and once they've turned the corner and they learn what it means to be halter trained, they are halter trained. It's very, very interesting. It happens over night, where you could be working with them for quite a while and they don't seem to get it and then all of a sudden, they've got it, and you know it, and they know it. So, here we have an Alpaca on a lead, and ready to be taught how to halter train. What we do initially with halter training is we train them, it's an Alpaca, we train them with their moms, and that's a wonderful device, is to take the Alpaca, the cria, with their moms out onto the road or out onto the pasture and where the mom goes, the cria will also go. And that's how we initially start them walking with a halter and lead and we never force them. We never are harsh with them. We just tell them where we want them to go. And it doesn't take much at all, it's just telling them where we want them to go."