Saturday, September 24, 2011

Rafas poorly foot returns, with avengeance :(

All our alpaca problems all seemed to happen within about a month, and seemed to flit from one problem to another so I am sorry if this part of the blog seems a little disjointed.

Well the grey boys had been moved and caused a mini orgy, but the other three boys Rafa, Galaxy and Santa missed the other boys so much, we moved them very soon afterwards. On reflection we should have given Rafa's foot a little more time to heal, however obviously we thought we had. So the boys all had access to a huge open space, basically three paddocks, where at least we thought they could have space. Not on your Nellie they are all still joined at the hip, and still as blooming frisky!

Of course we kept an eye on Rafa's foot. We made up a small pen to feed the boys in at dinner time, to we could keep an eye on it, and for a couple of days it seemed fine, it actually looked like it was healing nicely. He was n't limping, just bouncing along with all the others, usually first, when we came in through the gate, shaking our bucket to let them know it was dinner time. A few days past and we thought we should get hold of him and have a good look, when to our horror we saw a little maggott between his toes. FLYSTRIKE AGAIN! We were devastated!!!

Alan had watched Andres deal with Cassandra's flystrike problem, and was confident who could deal with it, and he did, extremely well. Poor Rafa was obviously in a lot of pain and discomfort whist Alan one by one removed the pesky little blighters! At one point Alan had gone to get fresh water and Rafa tried to jump a hurdle and I got a rather nasty bruise and scratch from his nail as I think I may have caught him, mid jump. Poor little fella. For days we checked it two or 3 times a day and treated it with antibiotic cream. A few days later you could tell it was feeling a lot better as he would let Alan lift his foot, and have a good look without him struggling. I was very proud of Alan, I'm not sure I could have dealt with it!

Rafa going for a walk one day!

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