When you own any type of animal, it's inevitable: he or she WILL die someday. So far this year, we've lost a Beta fish, and our young alpaca. Well, late last week, something happened with our oldest alpaca, Jaret, who's around 15.
Jaret spends alot of time in our barn so when we didn't see her for awhile, we didn't worry. But then, we found her out in the middle of our yard. It appeared as if she had fallen and maybe broken something. She was in pretty bad shape because it was cold and we had no idea how long she had been down for. John and a vet managed to get her to the barn, where the vet determined she had hypothermia.
The next day, her breathing was labored and she still couldn't stand. The vet came again and said that her temperature was almost back to normal but that he gave her only a 20-30 percent chance of recovering.
Yesterday she was even worse, so...this morning we had the vet come back out and put her to sleep. It was an agonizing decision but her quality of life had become so poor that we felt it was the humane thing to do.
So, hence my sadness.
When we decided to get into the alpaca industry, Jaret was the one I chose to be "mine". She was a beautiful color (burgundy, white, and grey/lavendar) and just so sweet. We will miss her terribly and hope our sole, lone alpaca left will be able to cope with being all by herself now.
photos: me