Alpacas don't like their heads being touched. Once they know their owners, and feel confident around them, they will probably allow their backs and necks to be touched, but they won't appreciate being grabbed, especially by boisterous children. If an owner need to catch an alpaca, the neck offers a good handle – and holding the neck firmly between the arms is the best way to restrain the animal.
To help alpacas control their internal parasites they have a communal dung pile, which they do not graze. Generally, males have much tidier dung piles than females who tend to stand in a line and all go at once!
Sheep baa, cows moo and alpacas hum. Different animals have different voices, but basically it is a "mmm" sound. However, they make other sounds as well as humming. When danger is present they sound the alarm call, a high pitched shriek, for instance. Some breeds are known to make a sound similar to a "Wark" noise when excited, and they stand proud with their tails sticking out and their ears in a very alert position. Strange dogs – and even cats – can trigger this reaction. (They recognise domestic cats for what they are – a relation of the puma, a natural predator of the alpaca in South America.)
When males fight they also scream, a warbling bird-like cry, presumably intended to terrify the other combatant. Fighting is to determine dominance, and therefore the right to mate the females in the herd, and it is triggered by testosterone. This is why males are often kept in separate paddocks – when two dominant males get together war breaks out!
A male in the act of mating, or hoping for a chance to mate, will "orgle." This orgling will help to put the female in the mood, and it is believed that it also helps her to ovulate after the act of mating – very necessary for a pregnancy to take place!
Pregnancies last eleven and a half months and the young are called crias. Soon after the cria is born the female will be ready to mate again, babies are therefore an annual event. A female is usually ready to mate for the first time at a year of age, but a male can often not work until he is two or even three years old.
Alpacas generally live for more than 20 years – we think! Conditions and nutrition are better in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Europe than in South America, so animals live longer and are healthier. One of the oldest alpacas in New Zealand (fondly known as Vomiting Violet) died at the end of 2005 at the ripe old age of 29.
Cite: Wikipedia
source : hydroponicsearch
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