Prologue - Vicuña 

ALPACAS: SYNTHESIS OF A MIRACLE

By Mike Safley

The wild vicuna stood rigid and still, a mere three feet away. Her round ebony eyes mirrored the image of a man, her mortal enemy for more than 10,000 years. She seemed to be simultaneously contemplating escape and submission. Her cria, only a few weeks old, stood boldly at her side, while the chacu swirled on around them.

The vicuna occupies a mystical place in the soul of Peru. It is the country's national symbol; its image graces the Peruvian coin. In ancient times, the Indians of the Peruvian sierra, or mountains, rubbed their newborns with bone marrow from the fleet vicuna, hoping their children would run fast and far. Fat from the vicuna was rubbed on expectant mothers' bellies to bless their unborn children.

Vicunas are one of nature's most elegant creations with long fragile necks and oversized heads that somehow suggest an extraterrestrial intelligence. The smallest member of the camelid, or camel, family, the vicuna has the largest heart, by 50 percent, of any mammal its size. Its coppery gold fleece is punctuated by long, silky white hair at its breast.

The hair of the vicuna is the world's finest natural fiber, measuring 12 to 13 microns. Cloth woven from this fiber is the worlds most exclusive: An ounce of vicuna fleece, unprocessed, sells for five times more than an ounce of pure silver. The fashion houses of Armani and Chanel passionately compete for this rarest of natural commodities.

Vicuna and guanacos, another wild camelid, populated the western face of South America for hundreds of thousands of years, their numbers so large they were impossible to count. Then one hapless day, human beings appeared and their numbers began a long decline; hunters pursued the guanaco and vicuna for more than 7,000 years before eventually domesticating them. The nomadic Selk-Nam Indians of Patagonia, at the southern tip of South America, exploited the guanacos' natural curiosity by crawling on the ground to portray a wounded animal, then jumping up and driving a spear into the fatally attracted Camelid. The vicuna hunters of the Peruvian puna, or high-desert grassland, ancestors of today's Quechua and Aymara Indians often hunted the animals by running them into man-made pits. Occasionally a cria, or infant Camelid, survived; they eventually became the domesticated foundation stock of today's alpaca.

(There are four species of new world or South American camelidae: the llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuna. They are usually classified as different species despite of the fact they can interbreed and bear fertile cria. While some say alpacas are closely related to llamas and guanacos, studies based on the dentition of guanacos and vicuna have led many researchers to believe the alpaca is most closely related to the vicuna. It is generally accepted that the alpaca species is made up of two breeds, huacaya and suri, which are distinguished by their coat types.)

The Incas, and before them the Tiawanaku and Wari people, refined the practice of raising huge herds of llamas and alpacas, turning their fleece into fine cloth. The Inca rulers, with their gift for organizing and governing vast territories, elevated the wild vicuna to exclusive status in the empire. The Sun Kings forbid the killing of vicuna. Instead, ceremonial hunts, or chacus, were held annually. These hunts were an enlightened form of conservation. Thirty thousand Indians would form a half circle, beating drums and chanting, as the vicuna ran before them. With the human circle growing ever tighter, tens of thousands of vicuna were soon surrounded.

The vicuna were then counted, the old and infirm slaughtered for their pelts and meat. The females, their cria, and the best male specimens were shorn and released. Thus, the vicuna prospered as the harvest of priceless fiber found its way to the Incan royal warehouses.

When the Spaniards, atop their horses, arrived with visions of sheep and cattle in their heads, vicuna and guanacos were slaughtered. Previously unknown diseases were introduced into the native herds by the Spanish sheep and the population of vicuna wasted further away.

In 1777, the Spanish colonists passed a law forbidding the hunting of vicuna, but the killing continued. After Peru gained independence from Spain, General Simon Bolivar, Peru's first governor, tried to stop the slaughter by issuing many decrees that dictated severe punishment for anyone who killed the fragile vicuna. The governments of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina followed suit, but nothing stopped the rape of the vicuna. Their fleece was too valuable to allow the defenseless animals to live. Poachers prevailed until there were almost none of the camelids left.

The vicunas were finally declared an endangered species and, in 1965, the region known as Pampa Galeras, in the Peruvian department of Ayacucho, was designated a national vicuna reserve, with 16,000 acres and 1,000 vicunas.

In 1968, an American, Dr. William Franklin, visited Pampa Galeras and embarked on what would become the definitive study of vicuna sociology. By observing the vicuna's primary social groups, he discovered that families were made up of six to eight females and one male, which grazed 40 to 50 acres on a permanent basis, and slept in adjacent, highly defined areas along the ridges overlooking their pasture. Each vicuna group occupied and defended an ecologically appropriate pasture, never overgrazing.

Franklin found that vicuna herds expelled their cria from the family group every year; females driven from their families sought admittance into a new family unit. The banished males joined nomadic herds of 25 to 50 males. They roamed the lesser pastures of the puna until they acquired their own females and a grazing territory large enough to support their families.

By guarding and expanding the reserve at Pampa Galeras, adding new reserves throughout Peru, and curtailing commerce in vicuna pelts by use of the Endangered Species Act, the Peruvian government helped the vicuna avoid extinction. But the poachers persisted and the long-term health of the vicuna population was far from assured. Then in 1991, Peru passed an innovative new law to govern the management of all camelids. For the first time in 100 years it became legal to export alpacas and llamas. High-quality animals exported to the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe were often bred in a more organized fashion than was commonly the case in South America; hopefully, in time, this will lead to the improvement of the breeds.

In addition, the government transferred ownership of vicuna production to the campesinos (Indians) and their village communities. A new government entity, the Council of National Camelids of South America (CONACS), was formed to manage camelid agriculture. Today the vicuna are shorn, tagged, counted, and released unharmed. Their absence of hair prevents poaching; shorn vicunas are of no value to the poacher.

The story of the vicuna is, in many ways, a metaphor for the alpaca which has weathered many a man-made storm to cling to a fragile existence on the plains of the high sierra. The last 80 years have been hard on the alpaca, their numbers constantly declining. The vicuna’s and alpaca’s struggle for survival intensified beginning in the early part of the 20th century, about the time Don Julio Barreda, one of the leading alpaca breeders was born, World War I was fought, and Peru faced continued political turmoil.

In many ways the effort to save the vicuna has paralleled the worldwide resurgence of the alpaca. It is only recently that the alpaca’s future has brightened, as herds have been established outside Peru, and international attention has been focused on raising and improving the suri and huacaya breeds. There were only a few thousand alpacas outside of South America in 1991, when CONACS was formed and it became legal in Peru to harvest vicuna fleece and export alpacas. Just ten years later there are almost 100,000 alpacas living in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, and the rest of Europe.

In that time, the bloodlines of Don Julio Barreda’s Accoyo herd have become recognized world wide for their excellence. Breeders in the countries where alpacas are raised covet Accoyo stock. The significance of Barreda’s influence on alpaca breeding for the last 60 years can not be overestimated.

Click here to view the Vicuña collection.