Hi all, Yesterday I spent a few hours at the property of the breeders where I bought my 2 boys. I've been working with them since February helping out with halter training some of their alpacas. We brought in about 10 girls, some had been handled a lot, some a little, but only a few had ever had halters on. Bridie, a 2 year old was described as "probably going to be a handful" as she hadn't been haltered and had received little handling. I was describing the TTouch to Trish (the wife) and after working on one of the older girls myself we swapped animals and I took over Bridie. She was still really flighty but at this stage Trish had put the catch rope on and had a halter on her. I just worked on her head, mouth, neck and starting along her spine working into her muscles. After about 15 or 20 minutes she decided to cush, so I knelt down next to her and kept working. About 5 minutes later her head was lolling up against me and soon after she was nodding off to sleep. We needed to trim all of their toenails so while I kept on massaging Bridie's head, neck and back and rubbing her belly and legs Trish and Bill were able to trim her nails without any resistance from her at all. When we were finished we walked away from her to concentrate on the others and she just continued dozing in the sunshine. We were able to halter and trim the nails of 4 or 5 of the others with minimal resistance while I worked on calming them. I can't wait to learn how to do the Ttouch properly next weekend at the clinic. Up to now I have just applied the basic principles that I read in the book and also some of the massage skills I have used over the years when I was massaging clients, albeit a little bit modified for the alpacas. Would you call that a successful day? I do. p.s. I paid a deposit on Bridie and hope to bring her home in a few weeks.
