Solving Rejecto-Dam
This article reprinted with permission from author Ian Lutz of Cas-Cad Nac Farm Alpacas. It was originally published in the Autumn 2009 Cas-Cad-Nac Farm Chronicles.
If you birth out enough crias sooner or later you will run into a female [alpaca] who wants nothing to do with her newborn. Often times, though not always, these are first-time moms who having just gone through a rather painful experience, just don’t grasp right off that they need to nurture that floppy looking wet thing that keeps humming at them. The good news though, in our experience, is that in the vast majority of cases the maternal instinct is there, you just need to figure out where the switch is to turn it on!
I want to start with the assumption that we have isolated our mom and newborn in some way, preferably into a bonding pen of some sort. The classic case of rejection we see most often is the female who when her new baby tried to go underneath her looking for the udder either screams, kicks, spits, lies down, or best of all: some combination of all of those! In these cases the best solution is to keep your cool and come up with a plan. Obviously the end goal is an independently nursing cria through the shortest route to that may not always be a straight line.
Thankfully there are two creatures involved here, the dam and the newborn and a natural instinct exists in both of them. The trick is to nurture that. These little creatures are born with the instinct to go looking for milk in dark places. It’s one reason why you will often see a newborn cria seemingly rooting around in the dark corners of a room — literally– often times with their little pink tongue sticking out, making a suckling motion with their mouths. Something innately tells them that they need to seek the dark place for sustenance. Thank goodness for that, for when we have a recalcitrant mom, a willing instinct-driven newborn can be our biggest and best ally! The key is making sure that your newborn has the strength to keep trying long enough that he or she can break through the dam’s cloud of nerves (you want to touch me where?!) and of course learn where his/her long term food supply is as well. To that end we need to make sure we provide our cria with the boost he needs to get standing and keep trying. If we must, we can even lay the female on her side (the same way one would restrain an animal when getting them into a block and tackle for shearing) in order to milk her out. Though not often popular with the first time moms (hence the laying on side) our more experienced females though will often allow themselves to be milked out with just a gentle arm around their neck while the other person works on the udder.
If you can get a little colostrum into the cria’s tummy and show it where its dam’s udder is, that is often enough to break through the haze of the dam’s nerves. We will often hold mom still around the neck while another person shows the newborn cria where the milk bar is. Often a female that screams and drops when we humans are involved will eventually let its baby nurse if we back off and the cria has the will, strength, and knowledge to go for the udder on its own. A fair amount of the dam’s acceptance of the cria though is predicated on the newborn being able to stand and walk around under it’s own power. Time and again over the years we have witnessed a new mom seemingly ignore its cria until it demonstrated the will to stand. It is the old prey species wiring that simply tells them not to expend energy on a creature that is not going to make it. That is why getting enough fuel into the newborn can be key to helping it take the next step of nursing independently and making even the most high strung new mom realize that yes, this is their baby. Often when a cria is able to get under its mom and latch onto a teat independently without any human touching of the mother, the tide shifts swiftly in our favor.
On very rare occasions we will experience a new dam so high strung that even with all of the above we find it necessary to give her a mild sedative (this is something that will involve your veterinarian, obviously), taking just enough of her edge off that we can get the baby nursing without her throwing a total nutter. Often that is all that is required and having had the little bugger under there she will continue to accept the cria when she is again fully cogent. There is of course that very small number of females who just will never bond properly with their crias and on the rare occasion when we have experienced that we simply do not rebreed those animals. Everyone must of course make that choice for themselves but given the high heritability of mothering skills we see no argument in such cases for further propagating those behavioral traits. That is rare though: I can count the number of those instances we have experienced here on one hand. In the vast majority of cases the rejection of a newborn by its dam can be overcome with a calm steady hand from the humans and the help of a strong, persistent cria. Good Luck!
November 14th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Another blog filled with insight and so much that newbies like me might not think of on our own. I know it’s a reprint, but I wouldn’t have known where to find it. Thank you for sharing.
Kathleen´s last blog ..Fall Fest Show for Owners and Alpacas
November 14th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
a great read, thank you for that info, sounds sensible to me.
November 14th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Good article! Animals can be so frustrating when you don’t know just the right thing to do!
Leslie´s last blog ..Little Feet
November 17th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Very insightful. Several of our breeder friends have had multiple “bottle babies” over the past couple of years – in 6 years in the business, we have never had one. I think we as breeders, oftentimes with the best of intentions, simply interfere too much in the process. After an hour mom is still rejecting baby – after two hours mom is skittery and baby is starting to panic – and where are the breeders? Right in nervous moms face!
We put our newborn, mom and a companion girl in a dark, quiet birthing pen inside the barn and leave them alone. We have a corner where we can quietly observe without mom being aware of us and no matter how nervous the mom has been, usually within an hour baby has had its first taste of milk. For me this takes a lot of deep breathing and prayer, but it has worked 100% of the time for us.