our alpacas: their personalities

I’ve always enjoyed being a student of animal behavior. To me, having two cats in the house is more than having a couple of companions who like to shed and get underfoot, it’s also having a mini animal behavioral lab right there to study every day. I’m fascinated with Cesar Milan’s books and his astute observations of the canine condition. So in addition to the main reasons, having alpacas is yet another way to study the myriad ways that animals behave with both us and with one another.

Now that our boys have been here at their new home for just under a month we’ve had a chance to really observe them and see how they’re getting used to the new digs, and also how their relationships with both us and each other are playing out. That’s been really fun and there have been some interesting developments compared to our expectations of how they’d behave.
At their previous home, Cinnamon and Benz were quite used to each other having grown up together and having spent a lot of time in the pasture together. Silverton, on the other hand, had been relegated to the goat pasture — despite having been gelded, he still wanted to bed all the ladies and fight all the boys, so he simply couldn’t get along with anyone (well, I’m sure he thought he was getting along with the ladies, but it sounded like they were getting just a little tired of his constant advances).
When we decided which alpacas we were most interested in, we knew that Cinnamon and Benz would be the easy choice: as 4-H animals they were highly socialized with people as well as with each other. But we were also interested in Silverton — his fleece was just lovely and he was so unique-looking to me. But we worried about whether or not he’d be able to get along with the other two boys given his bad boy reputation. So we asked Don and Jody about it and they decided to put the three boys with each other to see how they’d do. And it turned out they did just fine. Apparently Silverton’s time with the goats had curbed his bad boy ways and he was learning to get along with his fellow alpacas.
Being that he’s the oldest and had the reputation of being the pushiest, we assumed on bringing them home that Silverton was the natural herd leader. And mostly that has been the case: where he goes, the other boys follow. Silverton was also the first to do his alarm call when he saw something suspicious, and Don had told us that that’s the herd leader’s job.
To our amusement, however, Cinnamon has shown a tendency to be the bossier one and appears to be sharing herd leader duties with — or stealing them from — Silverton. We’ve noticed that about fifty percent of the time Cinnamon will decide to head off to a different part of the pasture and the other boys will follow. Benz appears to always be the swing vote, however. He’s the most docile of the boys but appears to be the one who picks who to follow first. If Silverton walks off and Benz follows, the Cinnamon goes. If Cinnamon walks off and Benz follows, Silverton will follow. If Benz chooses to stay with the other one in either case, the first alpaca doesn’t seem to go very far. Occasionally it will be Cinnamon who does the alarm call if there’s something to be concerned about (like the housecat that they’re absolutely sure is going to eat them, although they haven’t been alarm-calling in several days for that).
At first Silverton was clearly the loner of the group, probably because he’d been so used to being with the goats before. Cinnamon and Benz frequently spent their time close to each other while Silverton was content to be several feet away. Initially at feeding time Cinnamon and Benz crowded each other while Silverton kept his distance, having to be enticed to come any closer for food. Whenever people came into the pasture Cinnamon and Benz naturally walked up but Silverton would stay away, his head up with extra alertness.
But since they’ve been here the dynamic has gradually changed in interesting ways. With only three of them I’m guessing that the small herd size has forced them to become closer socially. Benz and Silverton appear to be better buddies now: during their belly baths the other day the two of them stood side by side for a moment and then looked each other and then, to my surprise, touched noses in what seemed like a sweet gesture of social bonding. Being that I know very little about alpaca social dynamics I honestly don’t know if that was the case — it could very well have been a toe-to-toe stand off for all I know or it could have meant absolutely nothing, but it really didn’t seem like that, especially since only a week or so before Silverton seemed genuinely concerned at Benz’s well-being after Benz laid down in the sun and gently poked his nose into the side of Benz’s face while humming. (Benz, however, was quite annoyed at Silverton for disrupting his nap.) Benz also seems to spend equal time sitting with both Silverton and Cinnamon now.
While Silverton has become sort of the hidden sweetheart of the group, Cinnamon has become bossier at feeding time. We’ve been feeding the three of them by hand so they can get used to us (rather than out of troughs in the barn) and Cinnamon is usually so busy lifting his head and making his pre-spit bossy face, moving back and forth between Silverton and Benz in an attempt to keep them both from eating what he clearly considers to be his food, that he forgets to eat himself. It’s clearly all talk and no walk, however, as most days Benz and Silverton simply ignore him and keep eating. Some days Cinnamon gets a little spitty here (not the green cud spit that means he means business in keeping you away, but the puff-of-air spit that comes first as a warning) but we’re told some alpacas are simply bossy. It’s not genuine aggression — that would mean biting and attempts at jumping on us, and these boys clearly aren’t going to be doing any of that. Cinnamon strikes us more as the playground bully trying to steal your lunch out of your hand. Unsuccessfully, really. He only really shows this bossiness at feeding time and it’s always directed at the other two boys, never at us. Occasionally I see him lifting his head and making his bossy face at the boys in the pasture when they’re eating closely together or when they’re standing close together during belly bath time, but it always looks pretty half-hearted. They don’t even wrestle each other, really.
We do find we need to gently push back on Cinnamon occasionally during feeding time. Sometimes I feed them by myself and sometimes I wait until Matt gets home, and if I’m by myself it can be hard to feed three alpacas with only two hands. I usually grab a scoopful of food and get two handfuls first for Benz and Cinnamon since every time they eat those two act as if they’ll never see the feed again. Cinnamon does his bossy face, occasionally spitting air, and then finally figures out that Benz is still eating and so, hey, he’d better eat, too. He’s willful enough that he tends to crowd me if I feed them by myself — the other day I found myself backed up against the barn wall with Cinnamon showing no signs of backing up. So I’ve started to take a firm but gentle hand with him at feeding time: I take my arm and slowly push back against his neck, forcing him to back up, when he crowds me a little too much. It seems to work for at least a few seconds, then he’s back again, making his bossy face. It’s pretty funny.
Silverton, showing his emerging sweetheart side, is frequently content to wait his turn. Up until recently I usually had to reach past the other boys to try and get him to eat out of my hand, at which point he’d very cautiously crane his neck, grab some food, and then scuttle back again. If I had to push Cinnamon out of the way Silverton used to get a little spooked and jump back. Lately, though, this no longer fazes him and he uses it as a chance to get closer so he can actually eat. And the other day he even took a bolder step: I crooked the scoop in my right armpit and fed Benz and Cinnamon out of my hands, and then turned to look and saw Silverton with his face buried in the scoop right in my armpit. The little bugger. It’s been really fun seeing Silverton get more comfortable with us as he’s been the most skittish. He’s certainly not going to be letting us manhandle him easily any time soon, but it’s been rewarding seeing him — and really all three boys — get more used to us being near them and touching them.
Benz is the biggest softie of the group. He’s clearly the sweetest and most social, always coming up when new people show up. He frequently lets me walk up to him and stretch my hand out to scratch his chin, mainly because he’s hoping there’s food in my hand so he’ll only let me do that for as long as he needs to determine that there is, in fact, no food in my hand and I have cruelly duped him. (Then he looks at me with those big, black-rimmed cow eyes as if to say, “why must you tease?”) But at feeding time he’ll usually stick around for a minute or two after the food’s gone — surely hoping for more — and will tolerate a quick rub of his neck, always looking at us with those huge brown eyes as if to say, “you…wouldn’t have any more food hidden in your pockets, would you?”
Because we don’t have as much direct reason to physically handle our alpacas — haltering them and leading them — as larger operations would, we figure we should take time to do it occasionally for the sake of doing it for a couple of reasons: first, so that we ourselves get more comfortable haltering them for them times we do need it, like vet visits, toenail trimming time, etc., and secondly so that they get more comfortable with us handling them. So later today (when Matt’s home to help me) I plan to start with Cinnamon and get him in the barn so I can halter him, check his toenails (they won’t need trimming yet but I want to look), and walk him for a little bit on the lead around the pasture. Maybe that will help curb some of his bossy ways. Let’s hope I don’t get spit on.