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| The History of Alpaca Breed Standards in the U.S.
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Date: 05/12/2006
By: Mike Safley
Author Link: www.alpacas.com
Copyright: Mike Safley
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| Very few alpaca breeders are neutral on the issue of breed standards; most fall into one of four schools of thought: 1. Absolutely in favor, 2. Wanting to learn more, 3. Apathetic or, “I don’t care what they do, I am going to breed to my own standard,” and 4. Absolutely and aggressively against breed standards of any kind. The breeders who favor standards believe the practice of animal breeding is the pursuit of perfection and view standards as useful guides in the quest for the ideal alpaca. The opponents of breed standards predict doom if standards are adopted, often suggesting that pressure from powerful figures involved in the industry is behind the effort to enact standards. Click here to read more.
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 |  Alpaca History
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Summary of Ideal Alpaca Community 2008 - 2009 Huacaya EPD Results
The Ideal Alpaca Community to pleased to provide detailed alpaca EPDs for members participating in the EPD program. Several dozen charts are presented that allow you to view EPDs using several different chart formats.
The Huacaya EPDs were computed for the IAC by Dr. David Notter of Virginia Tech. The source of raw data for the analysis was derived from the fiber test sample data IAC members submitted to Yocom-McColl Labs, plus fleece weights and shearing dates entered by members themselves. This includes fleece sample results for the 2007 and 2008 shearing seasons, plus hundreds of records from prior years, and some from early 2009 (prior to mid-April). A total of over 5,500 alpaca fiber test records were used in preparing the summaries. Test records include fiber tests from more than 4,500 individual alpacas. Alpacas younger than 9 months of age were excluded.
Work is currently underway to generate similar results for Suris. It is anticipated these results will be available in December 2009. In addition, an EPD analysis update is planned for the end of the year. It will include hundreds of additional alpacas from very large farms that were unable to submit results in time for inclusion in the current analysis. In addition, it will include all the submissions made thus far in 2009. If you submitted your fleece samples after about mid-April 2009 your EPDs will be in this analysis.
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