By Crash Barry

Alpaca meat

“Pull harder! Harder!” The gentleman farmer’s wife was loud in my ear. “You won’t hurt the baby,” she, a mother of three children, insisted. “Pull harder.”

The chaos in the corner of the front pasture of the Washington County farm was intense. Eleven humans, from age 3 to 63, fretted over a birthing alpaca. The mother lay on her side in the grass. Her soon-to-be newborn’s head and right front hoof were visible. My big, lubricated hands were in her vagina, my slippery fingers trying to grasp the baby’s body.

Up to this moment, my livestock experience consisted of three months of feeding, watering and shoveling the dung of two dozen alpacas. Two-thirds of the herd were preggers, so I knew my job as farm hand was gonna involve neo-natal activity. I prepared by reading the books, which said more than 95 percent of alpaca births occur without human help.

That morning, I had arrived at the farm a few minutes after this first labor had begun. By then the family and weekend pals of the gentleman farmer had staged a panicked intervention. Urgency and fear and hangovers surrounded the animal. Humans clamored for action. The baby wasn’t breathing well, they cried, and would die.

I barely remember putting my mitts inside. (My sweet wife had tried just a minute before, but couldn’t budge the baby.) My fingers worked blindly, twisting and turning, trying to untangle the second front leg, which was possibly stuck over the shoulder and perhaps causing the delay. Then momma released her hold and the cria (as baby alpacas are known) came out. The crowd went euphoric, in awe of the splendor of mammalian birth. Within 45 minutes, the cria stood on his own four feet.

At an hour, the little guy suckled at the teat and the gentleman farmer was already talking about an alpaca BBQ. Because in the alpaca world, girls rule and boys are worthless. A good female can sell for ten grand or more and the male is barely worth ten bucks. Only a chosen few fellas become valuable studs. The rest of the males don’t produce enough wool to pay for their hay and feed, let alone the other maintenance costs of alpacas. A world headed toward sustainable farming can’t support an agricultural fad with animals that cost $10,000 and produce seven pounds of high-end wool annually. Mix in the stiff competition from South America and the U.S. alpaca industry becomes just another speculative bubble — like real estate, Beanie Babies and dot-com names — bound to burst.

A Peruvian alpaca farmer I know says the flesh tastes like lamb. He says people in the States treat alpacas as pets instead of livestock. Alpaca meat, here, is taboo, because most alpaca aficionados anthropomorphize the camel cousins. To them, the cartoony critters are cuddly cute, funny and friendly, with quirky personalities. To ’paca-heads, eating an alpaca would be as repugnant as dog chops or roast puppy. I didn’t eat alpaca because I didn’t last long enough on the job to see the little guy fattened up.

The following week, the beautiful woman and I witnessed the wondrous — natural — birth of another cria. We stood 50 feet away, watching the mom slowly deliver an adorable little female. It took 30 minutes from start to finish, a gentle pace unencumbered by a gaggle of humans.

A couple mornings later, a couple days before quitting the farm, I was cleaning a dung pile. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of my favorites, Patty (who was overdue a month, almost), defecating in the middle of the field. Strange, because she was far from any of the half-dozen latrines established and preferred by the alpacas. A minute later she wandered away, pausing here and there to nibble on pasture. I walked to where she had been and discovered the body — perfectly formed, but tiny, cold and lifeless. A stillborn male. Patty, meanwhile, contentedly grazed and ignored me, her son apparently forgotten.

I picked up and bagged the boy and put him in the farm freezer. Not with the hope of reanimation, though. I’d heard that little corpses were used to train industry newcomers using simulated alpaca wombs and birth canals. For all I know, he’s still in there.