What wouldn’t I do for my alpacas? That’s a good question as I find myself doing more and more for them every day.
This is our full Peruvian MRG stud, Snowmass Incan Emperor. We currently have 6 offspring on the ground ourselves from him. One male is a 2x Reserve Color Champ, and another male is a 2x blue ribbon winner. The last two crias, DMAR Dolce and DMAR Dior, are turning out to be some nice contenders in the upcoming show season starting in the fall. With this in mind I used Incan on Shasta who is currently confirmed pregnant. Because I loved the way Dolce and Dior have turned out I was going to use Incan again on the mothers, Alexis and Electra.
Last week sometime I tried to use Incan. I noticed him getting down and then back up again. He was quite frustrated and I thought it was because of me since I kept reaching in to move the tail out of the way. After 5 minutes I was more frustrated than Incan and decided to put him back with the boys. A couple of days later I tried to breed him and the same thing was happening. This time I looked closer and noticed that he was not extending his penis and semen was dripping out from inside the shaft. Ok, now I understood why he was so frustrated. Incan obviously wanted to breed, but something was wrong.
I made an appt. for him to see the vet, but it would have to wait a couple of days as it was the weekend. In observing Incan I noticed his appetite was good and he didn’t seem to have any problems urinating.
Monday morning he was the first off the trailer and my vet began to palpate his shaft and penis. The doctor thought the front of his shaft was a bit swollen, however, she did ask me to go home and palpate other males to see if this was normal. She advised she hasn’t palpated that many males to know the difference.
After I explained what I noticed with Incan she then went on to snake (I use snake for a lack of a better word) the penis out of the shaft. In doing so she quickly noticed the side of the tip was swollen and had two small cuts on it. Ouch! She had me look at it while her assistant went to get Panalog cream. She applied the cream to the penis directly and then proceeded to stick the tube up the opening of the shaft to apply more panalog.
Directions for me was to go home and apply panalog up the shaft for one week once per day. I am also to give Naxcel once a day and banamine 2x/day. I’m sure Incan is thankful for the banamine relief. I am not to introduce Incan to a female for at least a month as to not cause more trauma to his penis.
Good news is that Incan should recover just fine. The steroids in the cream should ensure that his shaft doesn’t get any scar tissue build up and he should be able to breed with no problems in the future.
We’re not sure how this problem occurred. Many thoughts pop into our heads like during breeding some hair wrapped around his penis and when he extracted it could have cut into him, possibly he hit the ground and scraped his penis on some small rocks, or maybe he extracted his penis pulling some kind of debris back into the shaft. We’ll never know for sure.
Tom can’t believe that I am able to apply the med by myself into Incan’s shaft, but I do. Incan isn’t thrilled about it, but he’s a good boy.
So what wouldn’t I do for my alpacas?
