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Summer time at Lakes Entrance, on the southeast coast of Victoria, Australia, is a very busy time. When the city folk arrive here ready to relax and enjoy their summer vacation, the locals at this sea-side town are rolling up their sleeves to be sure that the best of service and entertainment is available for the six weeks of the summer holidays.
Here at Bungalook Alpaca Farm, just out of town, we had an idea for involving our alpacas in the fun. People want to learn about the bush, enjoy picnics, and just love alpacas. Perhaps we could take visitors for alpaca escorted bush walks, with a neat little pack on each animal to carry a simple picnic for small family groups.
I made a set of packs and with the help of our grandchildren we began leading our alpacas down through the paddocks, across the bridge, through the rain forest, up the hill and home again. It all seemed to be trouble free, so we invited our neighbours to lend themselves to the experiment. They were happy to oblige and brought their grandchildren to join in.
To our surprise and consternation we found that our tractable and placid ‘pacas didn’t like these newcomers and objected to the children. We had failed to recognise the vast difference between people who have been alpaca trained and those who have not.
The alpacas could spot the difference instantly and reacted with alarm. We did the walk. Our neighbours seemed to enjoy themselves; their children certainly did, but the alpacas most certainly did not. They behaved badly, pulling on their leads and lurching about, trying to stay as far away as possible from the new people. Obviously we would have to introduce many strangers to our animals before they would resign themselves to being handled by the uninitiated.
The most worrying aspect of this experience for us was to see the discomfort caused to the animals by the headstalls we were using. We have always regarded headstalls on alpacas as something of a problem, especially in the early stages of training young animals. Every alpaca owner must be familiar with the problem of nose bands pulling on soft tissue when placed too far down the nose, or side straps riding too high on small heads, putting pressure on eyes.
These factors are an uncomfortable distraction to early training sessions and have often caused us to remark that alpacas really need to have a headstall especially designed for them.
We had read Marty McGee’s article, My Alpaca Just Won’t Lead, in the fall ‘95 issue of Alpacas magazine, (USA.) Her observations about the problems of halters on alpacas strengthened our convictions. In the hands of untrained people this problem was much increased, so that although we were sure that our animals could be trained to accept handling and leading by inexperienced strangers, we felt that the headstall problem was likely to go on causing the animals discomfort. We set about designing the perfect ‘paca headstall, or halter.
Rick and I have both had a long association with horses, for many years training the youngsters we bred here at ‘Bungalook.’ One of the basics of training a young horse is to have a good understanding of the animal’s body structure and centre of gravity. This gives the trainer an advantage over an animal that is far more powerful than any human. The horse has a strong body, rectangularly based, with a leg at each corner, making him very powerful in forward and backward motion. Because of his elongated base, sideways movement is less stable and more awkward. He also has a long, flexible neck. If we place our control rope at the head end of that long neck and keep our body positioned at 90 degrees to the horse’s spine, we can fairly readily put him off balance if he begins to struggle. He is soon convinced that we have hidden powers and that struggling is fruitless. If we move our control rope to the end of the horse’s long bony head, we multiply the leverage effect that this principle gives us. That is why headstalls for horses are designed the way they are, with the point of control as far along the head-neck lever as possible. This design has simply been moved across to other animals, so all headstalls look pretty much the same.
Consider then the alpaca. Still rectangularly based with a leg on each corner, but small and lightweight, with a delicate head at the end of a very flexible neck. Do we need to take advantage of the lever effect by placing our point of control at the extreme end of the head-neck lever? No, of course we do not; we can easily control any alpaca by using just the neck. All we need to do is to position our lead rein at the top end of that long neck and secure it there.
We began experimenting with carefully shaped leather straps and found that the alpacas agreed with our theory.
Leading is a much more enjoyable activity if there is no pressure on the head at all. We invited more neighbours to come alpaca walking and found that although the animals sometimes rudely objected to strangers, the new headstall never caused them any discomfort or distress and offered every bit as much control as the old conventional ones did. The new design can even be used on cria from around two weeks old. These babies are learning when it causes them the least aggravation, trotting happily alongside mum, with a tiny headstall fitted neatly to the little head.
Having solved the headstall problem to our satisfaction, we looked again at the summer of ’97 and came to the conclusion that it was shaping up to be the longest, hottest, driest, most fly infested summer season that we had seen in a long while. Maybe taking people and ‘pacas for walks in the bush was not such a pleasant thing to do under these conditions. It seemed prudent to shelve the idea for a cooler, greener season.
In fact we never did revisit the idea. Instead we went into production of our Bungalook Headstalls, and now they may be seen on alpacas in many countries of the world. We believe we have developed a very good alpaca headstall, that at the very least makes leading more comfortable for the animals, and at best makes the training of cria possible, even pleasant, at a very early age. We still make them ourselves, hand stitching and testing each one.
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