What a night!!

Our poor little Lawbreaker's Legend went through the mill yesterday/early this morning!!

Yesterday morning, it was evident that he had been rolling around in the mud a lot and his demeanor, to say the least was listless. During the course of the day, he would kush then roll over and kick his legs out. This he did frequently. He would then get up and walk a bit and then drop down again onto his side and again, roll. He did not take any feed from mum whatsoever during the whole day, so it was down to bottle feeding him with some of mum's milk that we had expressed. Took his temperature........that was fine but nonetheless fitted him out with his cria coat. Called the vet and went through all the likely possibilities. Took instruction all to no avail. Decided to bring him into the barn with mum and continued the bottle feeding. This carried on until late last night when we decided that we were none the wiser as to the cause of his problems and we called the vet out on an emergency!

She arrived in the early hours of this morning....checked temperature, listened to his pulse rate, checked abdomen, weighed him, took blood samples and then as we had not seen him poo yet, she administered a liquid paraffin enema! Well that certainly did the trick in quite a spectacular way!! No sooner than he had ejected the retained meconium, all of his troubles were over and within 20 minutes, he was up and feeding from mum. We all breathed a huge sigh of relief but it taught us a very important lesson.......................if you are unsure about the ailment of your alpacas, do not hesitate to call the vet!!