Leathergoods Prices and Etsy

Unfortunately I have had to increase the prices of my collars and leads as well as P&P options sold through Etsy. This is because of Etsy's decision to increase their fees and to charge fees on shipping. I apologise to my customers for this change. For people ordering directly (just send an email through the contact page or contact me through the facebook group) and paying by bank transfer, the prices and P&P remain unchanged.

Fleur -- Deflowered

The proper name for an adult male alpaca is macho. While our senior suri stud Marius likes to escape and visit the poodles and eat the garden (see later part of video above) and is perfectly capable of mating with hembras and making them pregnant, he doesn't seem to be feeling very macho at the moment, possibly from a combination of the heat as well as being old and fat, and seems to be more interested in smelling the flowers than instigating matings by chasing and mounting females! To get his last mating a month or so ago, which resulted in Bess finally becoming pregnant, this resulted in putting halters on them both and running up and down the field with Bess in front of him, until it occurred to him to sing his mating song and she sat down immediately for him.

Fleur is now over a year old and big enough and interested enough in boys to have her first mating. The only male suitable to use on her is Marius, but when they were put together into a nice shady pen so they could get on with it, Fleur smelled Marius and rubbed herself against him, and he went and put his head in a food bucket and ignored her! We did eventually get him to mate with her, as this photograph and video shows, but you may well ask, what is Trident doing in the pen spectating?

Trident is our youngest male who it's hoped will become a stud later this year. He's only recently started showing an interest in females, and he is not allowed to mate with Fleur as she's his half sister. Because Marius was so reluctant to cut to the chase, I decided to let Trident practice in front of him to see if some healthy competition might spark an interest. Female alpacas will only mate with males who orgle (sing to them) and often they need to be chased and mounted before they will sit. What Trident has in enthusiasm, he lacks in skill, and his stud behaviour was atrocious. He kept forgetting to orgle, he mounted Fleur from the wrong end, and when she did go down for him, he sat on her head. Once he had pushed her down and squashed her, Marius suddenly remembered he was a macho and was quite happy to orgle loudly and barge the hapless greenhorn off Fleur and get on with his job!

When Patience mates or is involved in a spit off (which is the term used for showing a hoped-pregnant female to a stud male to test if she is pregnant or not by her reaction) her mother Bess is always very concerned about her and comes up to the pen to make sure she is OK. I let Trident chase Patience to spit her off while Fleur was mating, and Bess came up worried that she was being harried about, and spat on Trident on Patience's behalf when she rejected him. Oddly enough, Fleur's mother Poppy never seems to care if Fleur is being chased, and showed no concern that she was being sat upon by a fat old suri.

The Distaff, the Matriline, Epigenetics, and Mitochondria

In the Old Days when most people were farmers and before the industrial revolution, and even before the invention of the spinning wheel, a family's fabric all had to be made from scratch at home. The spinning equipment of the time was the drop spindle and distaff, and it was so time-consuming to make thread that most women and girls could spin and would carry their spinning paraphernalia about while watching their livestock or going up the lane to see their aunt, and spin any time their hands were not otherwise occupied.

The distaff is the thing that looks like a candyfloss

Whatever men and boys of yore occupied their hands with during idle moments doesn't seem to have passed into stockmanship parlance, or perhaps wasn't spoken of in polite conversation. Anyway, in modern times many people, men as well as women, do spinning as a hobby, and distaffs are uncommon in modern techniques, but the distaff remains as a slightly obscure piece of vocabulary to describe the mother's side of a pedigree.

Girly Girl Sire Paternal Grandsire Great Grandsire -- patriline Great Granddam Paternal Granddam Great Grandsire Great Granddam Dam Maternal Grandsire Distaff Great Grandsire Distaff Great Granddam Maternal Granddam Distaff Great Grandsire Distaff Great Granddam -- matriline

Example of a pedigree with the distaff indicated in red text

Often in stockmanship, when seeking advice from experienced persons, the wise old man or woman will say something way out there that sounds on face value silly and that seems to fly in the face of scientific understanding, and the younger more scientific enquirer thanks them for their advice and ignores it, until they later discover there does seem to be some truth in it and there is some scientific evidence to support it. Examples of these would include the belief that some animals tend to prefer to give birth under a full moon and that offspring that are very mildly linebred are fitter than both inbred animals and total outcrosses. Another aphorism you may hear from experienced breeders goes something like this: Faults and problems arising from the distaff are often harder to correct than issues coming from the sire's line.

According to the classic understanding of genetics, what the wise old stockman says would appear to be nonsense. All mammals and birds have diploid cells, that is, they have two copies of each chromosome, one from the sire, and one from the dam. Both the sire and the dam contribute equally to the genetic makeup of the offspring, and genes from either have equal chance of being passed on or lost. However, more modern developments in genetic understanding reveal a few things that might help to explain why the wise old stockman thinks this.

The first is that a tiny fraction of DNA is not found in the nucleus and thus isn't inherited in the conventional way. Mitochondria are structures that exist within the cytoplasm of the cells of nearly all plants and animals and are believed to have evolved from primitive bacteria-like cells. Although all domestic animals have mitochondria specific to their species, the DNA of mitochondria is very different to nuclear DNA, and the mitochondrion is always passed from a mother to her offspring, as she is the one who provides the ovum, and thus is the originator of the cytoplasm and mitochondria in every cell in the offspring. Male animals of course have mitochondria in their cells, but they cannot pass them on to the next generation through the sperm they produce.

It's known that mitochondrial diseases do occur, but it's not known if mitochondria contribute to other problems. Current thought is that mitochondria don't have a great deal of effect outside of a few specific conditions. However, if you are breeding to conserve a domestic breed or wild species, it can be difficult or impossible to recover mitochondrial diversity once it's been lost, so many breeders will pay attention to the matriline (the mother's mother's mother's mother...) in pedigrees in order to avoid losing matrilines. Mitochondria do change over time by mutation and the rate at which they change and how we can use that to understand evolution and other phenomena is something studied and debated by scientists, but this mutation rate is something that's unlikely to have much effect over human-timescale pedigrees.

Two matrilines: Bess and daughter Patience (left); Poppy and daughter Fleur (right)

Matrilines in domestic animals tend to be resilient as female offspring are usually retained for breeding programmes. However, sometimes matrilines can be lost because a female chances never to produce a female offspring, or occasionally because a female herself is so spectacular and useful to a programme that her male offspring are used widely on all the other females in the breeder's programme, to the extent that her female offspring end up not being useful to that programme on account of them being related to the best males and ultimately everyone else.

The second recently discovered way in which a dam may have undue influence on traits in her offspring is epigenetics. Every cell in a complicated organism such as a human, poodle, turkey, or alpaca, has the same DNA in the nucleus, and epigenetics controls how that DNA is used to construct a functioning organism and not a homogeneous pile of liver, brain, pancreas, blood, etc. cells by means of special proteins, structures, and chemical modifications to the DNA itself. Epigenetics is hugely important in not only the development, growth, and sustenance of life, but epigenetic errors are also implicated in many things that can go wrong, such as cancer. Although epigenetics is currently a hot research topic, there is still a great deal we don't understand about these mechanisms.

Usually, epigenetics works as intended, which is why chickens lay chicken eggs that hatch into chicks and grow into normal-looking pullets and cockerels, but it's recently been discovered that sometimes the environment can interfere with this process. The picture of the young duck above was taken today. If you look closely at the duck's wings, they are not right. The carpal joints have in fact developed incorrectly and the tips of the wings are twisted into an abnormal position. The wings can't function and can't be closed normally to fit flush with the body. This deformity has been seen in both wild and domestic waterfowl since time immemorial, and it used to be assumed that it was a genetic disease, but we now know it's actually caused by an inappropriate diet. What happened was, the shop we bought duck crumbs from shut down, and the other shop couldn't get the duck crumbs in on time, so the ducklings had to be fed non-medicated chick crumbs when they hatched. The ducklings looked normal, but when their adult plumage developed, the duck in the picture developed this fault. Fortunately, domestic ducks don't fly, and the duck's welfare will not be compromised by this problem, but wild waterfowl might be put at particular risk of this problem from people throwing bread and other unsuitable food in watercourses. How, exactly, the inappropriate diet causes the wings to form improperly is not understood, but it may well be an epigenetic effect is involved.

So how does this relate to our female animals and the distaff? Of course, the mother mammal is the entire environment of her offspring throughout all the most crucial points of its development into a new individual! Anything that affects her also has the potential to affect the young she is carrying. It's also the case in most mammals that female foetuses develop ovaries and ova while in the uterus; indeed all the eggs a female will ever have she is born with. This leads to something epigeneticists call the grandmother effect, whereby an event that affects a female's pregnancy can affect both her daughter and her grand-daughter.

Eggs is eggs

How do I identify if an issue might not be genetic, and what do I do to fix it?

Most genetic issues are either autosomal dominant or autosomal recessive. With an autosomal dominant condition, approximately half of all an animal's offspring will have the condition. With a recessive condition, one quarter of the offspring will have the condition only if both parents are carriers (who don't express the condition) whereas one affected parent will produce half affected if bred to a carrier, 100% if bred to another affected, but none affected if bred to an animal without the gene. There are also some conditions that seem to be genetically influenced, but we don't understand how the genetics work and what other factors are involved, and in these instances affected individuals can turn up occasionally every few generations. These numbers are approximates and tend to vary in real life, so it can be hard to observe patterns, particularly in animals who only have one offspring at a time.

Therefore, what should serve as alarm signals that something is going wrong in the environment, is unrelated animals living in the same conditions having or producing the same problems, a female whose young all or nearly all have the same problem regardless of using different sires on her, and any problem that doesn't go away in the first generation when a relative not expressing the condition is bred to a mate who is established through careful pedigree research to be unrelated to her through around ten generations.

When deciding what to do, the urgency of the situation depends on the effect the problem is having on the animals. Problems that can occur cover a whole spectrum, from harmless cosmetic faults that don't impact the animal's welfare and ability to express its normal behaviour or prevent it living happily as a pet, or being kept on until big enough to be humanely slaughtered and eaten, depending on the species, to painful, fatal, and heartbreaking diseases on the other end. In the middle are problems that might be a nuisance to the owner but are manageable, and problems that can quickly be fixed by a vet with a local anaesthetic. If an issue in your bloodline is seriously compromising the welfare of the animals, whether it is genetic or not, you should cease your programme until you have a good idea how you can remedy it, as the animals themselves need to come first.

The first thing to investigate is what the animals are eating. If they are grazing, is there anything growing in the paddock they should not have? Is their food/concentrate in date, not mouldy or contaminated, and is it specifically suitable for pregnant animals of this species in terms of its nutrient profile?

Have the animals been given any medicine during the pregnancy? It's best to avoid using medicines at all on pregnant animals unless they are absolutely necessary, even ones claimed to be safe in pregnancy. The tests to ascertain safety tend to be conducted in controlled conditions and they might behave differently in real-life situations in combination with other factors.

Are there any environmental exposures? Don't allow people to smoke near pregnant animals. Don't use smelly cleaning products, joss sticks, 'odourifiers' etc. in the house where domestic pets live. Don't burn rubbish upwind of your livestock or spray pesticides or herbicides on or near areas they use. Keep animals out of recently painted/redecorated rooms and consider not painting and redecorating close to when you plan to have pregnant animals.

Remember that you may have fallen afoul of the grandmother effect. People might often struggle for years with an animal who has trouble getting pregnant to succeed with a much-welcomed daughter, only to find the daughter has the same problems when they try to breed her. Rather than throwing their hands in the air and giving up, they might find that another generation was all it needed. If a problem of this sort is really difficult to work with or won't go away, it can be an easier solution to work through a male offspring, i.e. to break the distaff. Remember, though, that when you break the distaff, you lose the matriline. You can return the pedigree to the distaff by keeping a daughter of the son, but the mothers' mother's... line will have been broken. Unless you happen to mate the son to a female of the same matriline. This isn't always as difficult as it might sound, and largely unrelated animals can turn out to be of the same matriline if you look deep enough into the pedigree. Adhara and Indi (and therefore Pandora and Saffi) are both from the same matriline, but you have to go back 30 generations to 1905 before you find the mother's mother's mother's... whom they share. A century and 30 generations means little to a germ-line mitochondrion.

And if you are fortunate enough to have a female animal who is fantastic in nearly every way and a dream come true to your programme, you might pass her traits on more successfully if you keep her daughters for breeding and not just her sons.

Also, always pay attention to what old people tell you, even if it doesn't seem to make sense at the time. :-)

Alpacas in Midsummer

The alpacas who are pregnant, Olivia and Poppy, will hopefully give birth this month. After five attempts this spring, Bess finally appears to be holding a pregnancy by Marius. Her daughter Patience turned a year old in June and has been showing an interest in males for some weeks before, so she has been recently allowed to mate with Costa and we hope she will have her first cria in 2019.

Fleur, Poppy's daughter, will be a year old in a week's time and is well grown, but so far has shown no interest in males -- she runs, kicks her heels in the air, and farts in their general direction --- so she clearly isn't ready for a mating yet. Hopefully she will start showing interest before the end of August or she may have to wait until next spring. It is probably for the best that she wait a bit longer, as the only male suited to her is Marius and he's a great fat lump. Costa is grey and as Fleur is a white-spotted animal, she should not be covered by him as there's a one in four chance a deaf albino cria might result. The only other male we have who might be suitable as a stud is Trident, and he's Fleur's half-brother and so far has only shown an interest in Trebuchet, who is a boy!

Meanwhile everyone else, man or beast, continues to suffer in the midsummer heat.