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Sometimes it's necessary to
bottle feed or tube feed a little alpaca cria llama cria
if its mother doesn't have enough milk, abandons it, or the cria doesn't have a sucking instinct. It's essential that the cria receive colostrum, the mother's first milk, within 24 hours of the cria's birth. The colostrum contains disease-resistant antibodies. If you have to intervene to provide the colostrum, you can use goat's colostrum or cattle colostrum as a substitute. So before the cria is even born, you'll need to have some colostrum stored in your freezer for just such an emergency.
You can obtain powdered cow colostrum from most feed stores. Your cria should receive the colostrum in 4 to 6 feedings within the first 12 hours of its life. Give one pint of colostrum for every ten pounds of cria weight. For example, a 22 pound cria should receive 2 1/4 pints.
Checking Immunity Level
To ensure that your cria has enough immunity, you'll want to have the vet draw some blood and do an IGG test for immunity level. If the level is low, your vet will need to give the cria an alpaca or llama blood plasma infusion into the cria's abdomen. This sounds scary, but it's a fairly simple, quick, and painless procedure. It's a good idea to keep blood plasma in your freezer in case of just such an emergency.
Ongoing Bottle Feeding
Once you've gotten over the colostrum challenge, the real work of daily bottle feeding begins. Goat milk, if available, most closely matches camelid milk. But you can also use cow milk replacer that is readily availble from most feed stores. You'll want to buy the 25 pound bag of milk replacer, and then portion it out into 5 or 6 of the larger zip-lock plastic bags to keep out bugs.
A cria needs 8-10% of its body weight for maintenance and another 5-8% for growth gain. For example a 15 lb cria needs 1.5 lbs. If 8 lbs equals 1 gallon, then 1 pint equals 1 lb., and there are 16 oz per pint. So the 15 lb cria needs 1.5 pints for maintenance and another 1/4 pint for growth. You should divide this milk intake into 4 to six feedings per day. Your last daily feeding can be at 10PM since the cria will mostly sleep through the night.
When the cria is one month old, you can add some Gerber's baby rice cereal to your milk replace formula. I add 1/2 cup of rice cereal to 3 cups of my liquid milk mixture. I also add about 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil to the entire formula for some added calories.
This page last updated on February 22, 2006.
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