Wednesday 13 May 2015

Twins and a prolapse

I had been hoping that I would have been able to blog with cria photos by now, however the first three are now overdue, Elysian is on 365 days, Gabby 354 and Chiquita is on 345.  In fact we have 15 girls over 330 days gestation!

Sadly Venus gave birth in the early hours of Saturday morning in the pouring rain to twin girls, she had managed to carry them almost ten months.  I found her stood over them in the field at 5am (my usual early morning check), she was a first time mum and clearly very confused by things.

The girls were solid brown weighing 4kg and a tiny rose grey weighing 2kg, I spent the first few hours beating myself up about the bigger girl who may have stood a very slim chance had she been born during the day.

Disturbing pictures follow.......







Of all the alpaca lines we have Venus is from a line of girls who produce big babies so if anyone stood a chance of managing twins it would be this one, Venus's mum star was our biggest cria ever at 13kg.

Sadly the loss of the twins was only the start of it, Venus seemed to be taking a while to pas the placenta, and I was beginning to think that some oxytocin may be required but then she started to stain and out began to come the placenta.

It took slightly longer than usual, breeders out there will know that gravity usually plays a big part once the afterbirth starts to come away.  However this didn't happen and it soon became apparent that things weren't going to plan and she was prolapsing.

Poor Venus ended up with a double horned prolapse!  My phone went flat after this photo so you will be pleased to know you don't get to see the worst of things.

Venus isn't the most cooperative of girls and hates the halter and not getting her own way so catching her to resolve this problem wasn't going to be easy.  In fact it took us the whole time it took the vet to arrive to actually get her out of the field!  Thankfully I'd just managed to wrap things in clingfilm before she threw herself onto the ground squealing.

Sam Prescott, our vet,  is fantastic and after giving Venus an epidural soon got the left horn hack into position but the right was much tighter and took some doing but he managed.  Paul did ask if he was attaching it to her tongue at one point as he was having to go in so far!

Venus is now sore and not happy about being in but things are looking much better than they did.


The jury is out on whether to mate her again or not.  Has anyone else out there got any experience on prolapses, particularly double horned ones following twins?

I'm not looking forward to a straight forward, text book baby please girls.