Body Condition Score (BCS)

We all want to have healthy alpacas. A healthy dam has easier pregnancies and deliveries and lactation. A healthy herd sire can maintain his fertility. A healthy alpaca produces better fleece.

But how do you tell if your alpaca is healthy?

You can use weight as a general indicator for an individual alpaca, but weight can be misleading since muscle weighs more than fat. Also, pregnant and nursing dams will have fluctuating weights.

Appearance by itself does not work since alpacas have so much fleece that can hide the true body condition.

So, why not use the body condition itself? We need to get our hands on our alpacas.

The best way to assess body condition is to palpate the bone and muscle in the middle of the back bone near the last ribs. You place your fingers on one side of the vertebral spine (the bony part that sticks out the most) and your thumb on the other side. Do not assess the pelvic area as that area is normally rather bony.

If you feel just muscle and can barely detect the spine at all, you would rank that alpaca as a 5. A 4 would be a definite convexity. Instead if you cannot feel much muscle at all and mostly feel just bone, then you would give that alpaca a 1. A 2 would be a definite concavity.

Ideally, your alpaca will have good muscle mass and a prominent spinous process. Your alpaca would be a 3!

You can also check out the ribs along the sides to verify your score. Again, you do not want too much muscle and you do not want too much bone.

The perfect time to evaluate the body condition of your alpacas is during your monthly herd health assessment.

If your alpacas are too fat or too thin, you would then need to determine why they are not optimal. Are they getting too much or too little grain and/or pasture time? Are they pregnant or lactating? Do they have parasites?

So, now you have another excuse to get your hands on your alpacas while you are checking their body condition score!

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