Do Alpacas Spit?
Raising alpacas has been a true joy and a real adventure. We started 5 years ago with 8 alpacas and currently have 30. Along the way we bought a few, lost a few, & played midwife to 22 births.
When I meet new people and tell them that I raise alpacas, invariably the first question, after all the oohhing and aahhing about how cute they are is, do they spit? Heck yes they do, but not necessarily at people.
Now that’s not to say that I haven’t been spit on, because I have, but usually it is because I got in the middle of a spitting match between 2 alpacas. Alpacas don’t have a lot of natural defenses, they can’t reach up and swat you away, (they can kick, but their feet are soft so they don’t do any damage) they mostly just run away if they are truly threatened, but in the everyday life of an alpaca herd, there are disputes, disagreements and arguments that need to be settled and spitting is one of the main ways for resolving issues.
Alpacas basically have 3 different types of spits.
The “air” spit, which is just what it sounds like & can be used to say, “I am really annoyed, get out of my face” or “that is my food, leave it alone”, or, and this is one of my favorites,
“NO, I will not have sex with you, now beat it buster!”, but more on this in an other post.
The second type of spit is the cud spit.
Alpacas, like cows, are ruminants, and are cud chewers. What is cud, you may ask? Without going in to a great deal of detail, it is partly undigested food that alpacas regurgitate to chew on further before swallowing it again to be digested. Yuck! But alpacas don’t seem to mind and spend all day chewing on their cud
The cud spit is more of a warning shot across the bow, if you will, and consists of whatever cud might be in the mouth at the time. I will walk around during the day and see alpacas with clumps of cud stuck to their heads, faces, necks, etc which tells me that they got sideways of one of their buddies. I see this mostly on the crias (baby alpacas) and it really is quite comical.
Finally, there is the truly disgusting, smelly, nasty, spit that leaves the spitter with his mouth hanging open and green goo running out of his mouth. This spit is reserved for extreme circumstances when the alpaca is truly mad and the first 2 spits just won’t cut it. For the purposes of this post, we will call it The Green Goo Spit (I like to use very concise technical language!).
While writing this post, I tried for days to catch my boys fighting so I could accurately show you the green goo spit, but they were perfect gentlemen, unlike every other day of the week when they are not!
I searched long and hard on the internet and finally found this picture on Lana Plantae’s blog. It must have been an epic battle as it seems that everything in sight is covered with goo, including the T post.
So there you have it, everything you may, or may not, have wanted to know about Alpaca Spit! Have you been spit on? If so, I would love to hear about it!
Until next time, Happy Trails
[ssba-buttons]
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Thanks Mom and Dad…they are a hoot…when you visit, we will make sure to put on the spit socks just to be on the safe side (only kidding :)!
I loved this. So informative, yet so darn funny. Cant wait to meet some of these characters:)