Lies you are told when you buy Alpacas:

• They don’t eat your newly planted trees and shrubs;
• They are friendly and love humans;
• They are good lawnmowers;
• They are good guard animals, with the cyber enchanced night vision and side mounted machine guns;
• They don’t need shearing;

OK OK, so those last 2 points weren’t actually told to us, but they were implied (uh huh). Anyway, when it comes down to it, they don’t actually have machine guns and they do need to be shorn (sheared? I dunno) once a year or they will explode.

So, last week we arrange for the world famous Ian Elkins, 4 times Australian Merino Shearing Champion and 7 times Australian Shearer of the Year to come shave some layers off the boys.

Before we start, some before pictures:

Clickety Click

So, Ian arrives with this fabulous contrapulation, otherwise known as the Alpaca torture device:

Clicky Clicky

… and began work, wool flew, feet flew, we had to use a sock on the animals faces to prevent a repeat of the mouth spit incident when we cut their nuts off (that’s the scientific term for castration).

  
Clickery Clack

So he does the business, the Alpacas were none too happy after being wrestled onto the table, tied down, bound and gagged then shaved to nearly naked (would YOU be happy?)…but in the end, I’m sure they won’t hold it against us (and we’re probably lucky those machine guns were a hoax).

Click Clickety Click Click Click

For anyone interested, Ian Elkins did a great job so here’s a free plug for him:

NOTE: I can’t have the old photo gallery on the new host until I arrange for some more storage space, it’s about 300mb of pictures alone) so for now, I’m going to be linking off to larger version of the pictures, all the above pictures are clickable to a larger version, if you REALLY want to see a zoomed in version of an Alpaca.