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Alpacas, the other white meat.
by Q On a recent Sunday (Feb 1) Marita and I contacted a couple of the local Alpaca farms to see if we could learn what all the Alpaca fuss was all about.
If you're wondering what an Alpaca is then you clearly haven't seen the ilovealpacas.com TV commercials as we have. (For the uninformed who are too lazy to click the link, Alpacas are just smaller, softer, friendlier llamas.)
We'd been wanting to go to a petting zoo for some time but couldn't really find any in the L.A. area. To be fair we found some, but I couldn't quite work out whether they were the sort of thing I remember from childhood; a farm where you go, buy food for the animals, and then feed/pet everything from chickens, to rabbits, to llamas, to goats, etc.
An Alpaca farm seemed like a good substitute. They seemed pettable enough, and I genuinely wanted to understand what the alpaca business was all about. The commercial (again for those who haven't seen it) is basically a husband and wife describing how they quit their day jobs to experience the bliss and financial success of raising Alpacas. The bliss of raising animals I could understand, but the commercial sort of skipped over the financial aspect. Just where does the income come from? What becomes of the Alpacas you raise? Do they become Alpaca burgers? Do they get turned into alpaca skin jackets? Or do you make all the money from selling their wool (fiber)?
So... We contacted one of the local Alpaca farms and went for a visit. We thought it would be a quick visit. Maybe we'd spend 30 minutes petting Alpacas, getting a few photos, and learning a couple of things about the business. Instead we spent almost four hours immersed in the subject.
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The Alpca farmer, we'll call him Johnny, was incredibly nice, almost suspiciously so. Part of the suspicion just came by way of the commercial. At the end of the commercial they tell you to go to the website, contact a farmer in your area, and schedule a visit. I couldn't understand why any farmer would want to be bothered with newbies asking stupid alpaca questions. What is in it for them? This much I think I've managed to figure out.
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