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Introduction |
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The first camelids deposited their bones in North American soil during the Cenozoic Era, forty
million years ago. These ancient ancestors of today’s alpacas were the size of jackrabbits and had
four toes on each foot. Over the next thirty-five million years they evolved, diversified, and
colonized the entire continent. The Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida, houses
an eleven-foot-tall skeleton of a Hemiauchenia macrocephala (large-headed llama) that was discovered
in the early 1980s by an amateur paleontologist, Steve Beck, in a fissure-fill deposit in
Citrus County, Florida1. This distant cousin of the Middle Eastern camel left North America
five million years ago.
Two million years ago, another camel cousin, smaller and more graceful, migrated to South America down
the Panama land bridge to the virgin region that would become Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. These ancient
ancestors of llamas, alpacas, guanacos, and vicuñas thrived on the grassy pampas, becoming too
numerous to count.
North America was Eden for large mammals until mammoth hunters, traveling across the Bering land bridge
from Siberia, arrived in Alaska eleven thousand years ago. These fearsome hunters made their way to
Wisconsin, spreading out across the continent. For the next four hundred years, they slaughtered nearly
every animal weighing more than a hundred pounds: horses, sloths, saber-toothed cats, elephants, and
camelids. Known to paleontologists as the Clovis culture, these mighty hunters eventually trekked to the
tip of South America, where they hunted vicuñas and guanacos. At some enlightened point in time, they
learned to conserve and husband the camelids, abandoning the practice of indiscriminate slaughter.
Agriculture and the domestication of animals began in South America, the Middle East, and Asia about
eight thousand years ago. But instead of Europe’s cows and Asia’s horses and oxen, the Indians of the
altiplano nurtured vicuñas into alpacas and guanacos into llamas. Nations rose on the backs of these
domesticated camelids. With llamas as beasts of burden, transportation and trade began and great cities
appeared, connected by far-reaching tentacles of roads. Cloth woven from alpaca fiber became the coin of
the realm.
The early domestication of animals occurred by accident, but the practice was cultivated and refined
by the hard work and dedication of those ancient shepherds. It wasn’t until 1760 and the pioneering
work of Robert Bakewell of Leicestershire, England, that animal breeding became a science and livestock
became an industry. From there, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would parlay the successes of
animal breeding into an understanding of the animal and plant species in the wild. And in fact, as a
young man, the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) studied Bakewell’s work. His research
into the success of Bakewell’s selection decisions led Darwin to formulate his theory of evolution.
In 1831, his passion and insights propelled him to travel with Captain Robert Fitzroy on the HMS Beagle,
a trip that would take Darwin to the southern tip of South America and bring him face to face with
guanacos and vicuñas. In his journals, Darwin traced the connection between these South American
camelids and the camels of the Middle East. As he perfected his ideas about the role of the environment
and evolution in the development of plants and animals over epochs, Darwin began to see nature’s
order more clearly than anyone else of his time. But Darwin was never able to divine the mystery
of inheritance. That was left to a Moravian monk, Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Together, the work of
Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin created the basis for our modern understanding of the natural sciences.
Later, in the twentieth century, men like English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947),
German physician Wilhelm Weinburg (1862-1937), and American geneticist Jay Lawrence Lush (1896-1982)
used the work of Mendel and Darwin to build the theoretical framework for the science of animal breeding:
population genetics.
By the time Darwin saw his first vicuñas and guanacos in South America, they had disappeared from North
America, with the possible exception of a few that were found in North American zoos. The first llamas
appeared in the United States during the 1920s, imported by William Randolph Hearst from South America
to his estate in San Simeon, California. As a 1960s’ metaphor for a simple life, llamas were rediscovered
by the counter-culture. Alpacas, however, remained far from their North American origins until 1980,
when llama breeders Richard and Kay Patterson of Sisters, Oregon, flew North America’s first privately
owned alpacas from England to the United States. Beginning in 1983, animal dealers such as Phil Mizrahie,
Tom Hunt, Jurgen Schultz, and Irv Kessling imported just over a hundred alpacas from Chile to the United
States. In 1986, the first alpaca breeders met in Kalispell, Montana, and conceived what became the Alpaca
Owners and Breeders Association (AOBA). Their newsletter, Alpacas!, only a few pages printed on plain paper
in black and white, eventually became three distinct publications: Alpacas Magazine, a two-hundred-page,
four-color magazine; The AOBA Hummer; and One Voice.
By 1987, there were approximately six hundred alpacas in the United States, and the International Lama
Registry (ILR) began registering alpacas in addition to llamas. The AOBA membership exploded as alpacas
captured the imagination of Americans who wanted to move to the country to become shepherds. The
organization’s budget grew from a little over $3,000 in 1987 to over 1.5 million dollars in 2006.
At the first U.S. alpaca show in Grass Valley, California, seven breeders exhibited thirty alpacas
in six classes; in 2004, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the importation of alpacas into the United
States, the AOBA National Show had 1,653 entries, 1,445 exhibitors, and 242 classes.
At first, alpaca imports from South America filled the burgeoning demand. But as the public’s
appreciation of alpacas increased their value, alpaca owners became divided on the issue of unrestricted
imports, and politics took root. The South American animals, source of the foundation herd, began
to be considered by some in the U.S. alpaca community as a commercial threat. Breeders became concerned
about both the quality and the quantity of the animals entering the United States. In 1997 there was
a border war between importers, U. S. alpaca breeders, the Canadian registry, and the newly-independent
Alpaca Registry, Inc., known as ARI. Eventually a battle to close the Registry was waged, polarizing
the North American alpaca industry and creating a division that has never completely healed.
The growth of the United States alpaca community has followed an ascending path over the years, but
it hasn’t always been an easy climb. As in any industry that mixes people, money, and egos, there has
been some skullduggery and a lawsuit or two. But the camaraderie among the breeders has prevailed, commanded
by their shared affection for alpacas, and the North American alpaca industry has prospered. Its growth,
over time, has been nothing short of phenomenal.
1 Florida Museum of Natural History, "Digital Library, The Hall of Florida Fossils,"
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fossilhall/Library/Llama/Llama.htm (accessed May 2, 2006).
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