The focus of the alpaca breeder is to breed for consistent, soft and dense, elite fibered animals in their herd.  This sounds easy but is incredibly difficult to pursue.  Normally if your animal is dense, then your softness disappears.  The denser the animal the more harsh the fleece is.  Although there are many that have come close, there is no alpaca as of yet, that has reached the full potential that we breeders are seeking.  When looking for animals try choosing a pair of dense animals and a pair of super soft animals and build your herd from there.

If you are breeding for color (except for grays), examine the animals carefully for consistent color throughout the whole fiber.  Not only are the clothing manufactures meticulous about the fiber colors they buy, but different colored fibers are different in their softness…example, white is softer than black.  A tool that can help you with this too is their ARI certificate.  Sometimes the certificate will show several generations of the ancestry of the alpaca and what color they were.

Of course, look at the conformation of the animal.  Check for any genetic problems that could pass down to your crias.  Alpaca teeth are subjective in the fact that their teeth continue to grow all their lives.  Looking for a good bite means that the alpaca’s teeth must align with their top gum with an extension of no more than a eighth of an inch either way of the gum.  As the alpacas grow older, their teeth will grow longer.  Alpacas do have a hump on their back, but you do not want too much of a hump or too little of a hump.  Keep in mind their legs too, are they straight and does the alpaca walk freely.  Any distorted parts are undesirable, to long of legs, to long of back-line, to long of ears, to short of neck, etc….  Alpacas should be 1/3 head and neck, 1/3 body, and 1/3 legs with a nice square looking conformation.  Most of these distortions can be bred out of your animals with other alpacas that do not have these traits.

I believe in checking the progeny of your animals that you plan on buying.  As well as, the dams that sires have bred with to make sure that the dams are equal to your dams.  This tells you what to expect from the breeding.  No pair of animals will throw award-winning crias every time but you want to see a higher percentage of good-looking crias for your breeding program.

The key word here is consistency.  It does no one any good to have one animal that has reached its full potential while the rest of America’s animals have not.  No matter what breeding program you choose.  Choose to make your herd consistent first before upgrading your breeding practice to the next level.