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Monday, July 27, 2009

Re: [AlpacaTalk] Re: Failure of Passive Transfer,

 

I don't know of any alpaca breeders who milk their alpacas to collect colostrum. I would sort of be afraid to do that, simply because I do't want to rob the current cria of its colostrum intake!

I have a wall baby this year, who got caught between a gate and a wall. She was almost dry when I went out to check on her dam at 8:30am. But, she had bonded with the wall and refused to have anything to do with nursing from her mama. She does acknowledge her mama now, but still won't nurse from her. So anyway, I gave her bovine colostrum that I got in powdered form from the food store. It's widely available and Valley Vet has some pretty good choices and prices. 

I read a paper that said that bovine colostrum, while not providing as much protection to crias as alpaca colostrum, was more effective than goat or sheep colostrum. I can't find it right now but will post when I do locate it again.

Heather


On Jul 27, 2009, at 8:25 AM, AmyJoLabbe@aol.com wrote:


I am curious if any alpaca breeders are routinely collecting colostrum and freezing it? This is something we routinely did while breeding horses. You just never knew with this maidens how good the colostrum was. So we always collected from the proven dams/milkers and froze it. When a new baby was born we would defrost and dose all babies born to maiden dams. We never lost a single foal and never had to do plasma. 

We are thinking of freezing our goats colostrum. We have Nigerian does and they are really good milkers. 

Last year, our first year, we lost our first cria from passive transfer failure. 

This year we had a maiden with virtually no milk and it was nearly impossible to find colostrum. She ended up getting goat from TSC. Sadly all our does were dry and we could not help her out. I was wondering then....had I only frozen the year before!

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posted by Chaddo at 9:53 AM

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