Another Worrying Time

We had another birth yesterday, Emily gave birth to a little boy. This was Emily's first cria and she is not a very big girl, she had quite a hard time and was running out of energy, she was lay on her side pushing and pushing and in the end needed assistance to deliver his shoulders, with a pull while she contracted we managed to get the shoulders out and then with a final push he had arrived in this world.

He is lovely light fawn boy with the longest curliest fleece I have seen this year. Within 10 minutes he was sat up and look liked he was going to fine but that was as far as he was willing to go!!

Although Emily was 350 days and he weighted 8kg, he still appeared to be premature, his teeth have not come through yet, he had membrane still attached to his mouth and he had little flippers on his feet.

Emily is normally a real placid girl, but she had suddenly turned into a vicious monster, spitting and stamping, and charging with her teeth fully beared at anyone who attempted to approached her baby, this being alpaca or human.

So we stepped back and watched from afar, but after a hour we tried to encourange him to move, he did stand and walk for a minute, but promptly sat down again. He did eventually start to get up and move around, although in a very clumpsy way he looked like he had long boots on and found it difficult to walk, this was due to him being very down on his pasterns.

About 7pm he was over 5 hours old and still had not fed, or even attempted to feed, so I defrosted the plasma and gave him it in a bottle, which he happily drank, this perked him up a bit but at 9pm he still wasn't attempting to feed from mum, so I then gave him a bottle of milk.

Got up this morning not knowing what I would find, he was still with us, but still not feeding from mum.

So today I have taken over mums job with the bottle, he takes it well, but still doesnt get up for very long. The vet gave me antibiotic injections to give him to cover him for any other infections.

So please meet "Cotswold Vale Dexter"

I couldnt make up my mind if to blog about him, but I think he deserves a blog, we are doing all we can and at the end of the day mother nature will decide his fate (brave words I know, and I wont sleep much tonight and will not look forward to going out to the barn in the morning!)

Ginnie