11/09/2026
🦙 In the Life of an Alpaca Owner…
Owning alpacas is a wonderfully peaceful lifestyle.
You spend your days standing in beautiful countryside, surrounded by gentle animals, breathing in the fresh air and reconnecting with nature.
Basically a wellness retreat.
Except the retreat is three acres of mud, somebody has just pooed in the water bucket, you’ve got hay in your bra and sixteen alpacas are staring at you because you’re four minutes late with the carrots.
You arrive at the field full of optimism.
“Morning everyone!”
Nobody cares.
Then someone spots the carrot bucket.
Suddenly I’m Beyoncé arriving at Wembley.
Sixteen long necks appear from absolutely nowhere, Lambo starts barging his way through like security and I’m trying to distribute carrots fairly while being mugged from several directions.
There is no such thing as “fairly”, by the way.
One alpaca gets a carrot and immediately behaves as though he hasn’t been fed since 2019.
Another chews his slowly while maintaining eye contact with you, presumably so you fully understand that your entire purpose in life is vegetable distribution.
Then there’s poo picking.
People imagine owning alpacas involves walking gracefully through fields at sunset.
It does.
Usually pushing a wheelbarrow full of poo.
You can clear an entire area until it looks absolutely immaculate, turn around to admire your work and hear that familiar little sound behind you.
Excellent.
Thank you, George.
We’ll start again.
Then there’s the weather.
Running an outdoor alpaca business in Greater Manchester means checking approximately seven weather apps every fourteen minutes and choosing whichever forecast you like best.
One says sunshine.
One says showers.
One says 40mph winds.
And the BBC appears to be forecasting weather for a completely different planet.
Eventually you decide the alpaca walk is going ahead.
Ten minutes before everyone arrives, the heavens open.
The customers turn up in pristine white trainers.
I look down at the mud.
The mud looks back at me.
We both know how this ends.
Alpaca walks themselves are beautifully relaxing.
Until an alpaca decides that walking is no longer part of his personal journey.
You can encourage him.
You can coax him.
You can offer him a carrot.
You can explain that twelve paying customers are waiting behind him.
He does not care.
He has found a particularly interesting blade of grass and the entire Calderbrook Alpacas operation will now remain stationary until further notice.
Then another alpaca suddenly decides he DOES want to walk.
At approximately 46mph.
And you’re jogging behind him shouting, “Lovely! Just keep a little bit of space between you!” while internally wondering whether this counts as cardio.
Visitors often ask me:
“Do they spit?”
Technically, yes.
“Will they spit at me?”
Probably not.
“Do they bite?”
Not really.
“Do they kick?”
They can.
“Are they friendly?”
Absolutely.
And I realise this isn’t sounding nearly as reassuring as I’d intended.
Then there are the personalities.
People think alpacas all look similar until you own them.
Then you realise you’ve somehow acquired sixteen completely different colleagues, none of whom respect management.
There’s the confident one.
The nervous one.
The greedy one.
The dramatic one.
The one who follows you everywhere.
The one who suddenly behaves as though he has never seen you before despite you literally raising him.
And the one who looks suspiciously innocent, which usually means you should immediately check the fencing.
And then there’s Lambo.
Lambo is a sheep living with sixteen alpacas who appears to have concluded that he is also an alpaca.
At this point none of us have the heart to tell him.
Fencing becomes another obsession.
Before alpacas, fencing was just… fencing.
Now I inspect posts like a structural engineer.
Why is that leaning?
Who has rubbed against this?
Why is THAT loose?
And, most importantly…
WHAT HAVE YOU LOT DONE NOW?
You repair it.
You strengthen it.
You stand back proudly.
An alpaca immediately scratches his entire body against it.
Fantastic.
Then occasionally somebody looks slightly “off”.
And every alpaca owner knows exactly what happens next.
You stare at them.
They stare at you.
You walk away.
You walk back.
Still staring.
“Is he chewing normally?”
“Was he standing like that before?”
“Has he always held that ear like that?”
Twenty minutes later you’ve convinced yourself something terrible is happening and you’re examining poo with the concentration of a forensic scientist.
Normal poo.
Never been so pleased to see it.
And when one genuinely IS poorly, everything else stops.
Plans change.
Sleep disappears.
Vet visits happen.
Medicines, injections and endless checking begin.
You worry about them far more than you ever imagined you would because somewhere along the way these ridiculous, stubborn, gentle creatures stopped being “the alpacas” and became your boys.
Of course, none of this is what visitors see.
They see the lovely field.
The alpacas.
The cuddly faces.
The beautiful photos.
Meanwhile I’m just outside the frame covered in mud, carrying three buckets, a bag of carrots, two headcollars, some mysterious piece of fencing and approximately seventeen jobs I was supposed to have done yesterday.
But then something happens that makes all the madness worthwhile.
A nervous child reaches out and touches an alpaca for the first time.
Someone who arrived anxious starts smiling.
A family laughs all the way around an alpaca walk.
A child who struggles to communicate starts talking to one of the boys.
An elderly resident lights up when an alpaca walks into the room.
Or I stand quietly in the field at the end of the day and watch sixteen alpacas and one slightly confused sheep munching away together.
And I remember why I started all this.
They’ve given me stress.
They’ve given me mud.
They’ve given me vet bills.
They’ve given me approximately 94,000 wheelbarrows of poo.
They’ve destroyed things I didn’t even realise were destructible.
And they’ve probably taken several years off my life.
But they’ve also given me some of the funniest, happiest and most rewarding moments of it.
So yes…
Owning alpacas is wonderfully peaceful.
Just perhaps not in the way the brochure suggested. 😂🦙❤️
I wouldn’t change my alpaca life for the world.
P.S. Before anyone contacts the Alpaca Police, this is called humour. 😂
No alpacas, sheep, wheelbarrows or carrot buckets were harmed in the making of this post.
The fencing, however, has declined to comment.
🦙 Calderbrook Alpacas
Where life is basically eat, sleep, poo, repeat… and occasionally take humans for a walk. 😂
