Sunday, March 01, 2009

Say Cheese!

Today I had my first experience using the Tooth-a-Matic. Marie will be competing at the MOPACA show the end of this month and her teeth needed to be trimmed. Trimming alpaca teeth is regular part of alpaca husbandry and until now I had only observed or held the alpaca's mouth open. But, since Marie is my alpaca, today I had the honors.
Here is Marie in the chute and ready to go. She was less than pleased at this point and I was prepared to be covered in spit.


I'm using the Tooth-a-Matic in this photo - my photographer wasn't willing to get too close and I'm left handed so it's hard to see. It was much easier to use than expected. Also there were other alpaca owners visiting the farm so I had quite the audience for my first attempt at alpaca dentistry.


Now I'm just smoothing her teeth out a bit with the Dremel.


Here we both are afterwards, none the worse for wear. Marie was actually quite calm during the whole thing and there was no spitting. Yay!

By the way, I'm told that I'll be doing teeth on Shearing Day, April 14th...um yay?

We also did a couple of more halter training lessons with the crias: Griffin & Morrighan



Here I am working with Morrighan.


Griffin went outside the pasture on the halter for the first time today. At first he wasn't very sure about it but then he saw Samantha and became quite curious. Even at a young age he LOVES the ladies.

1 comment:

  1. I love my Toothamatic! It saves me tons of hours and dollars a year. Plus I rarely need to sedate alpacas to do teeth. Yea! Thanks for sharing your experience with it.

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