Alpaca raising can be very interesting indeed!
Some alpaca behavior is charming, some disgusting, and some just plain fascinating. The latter is what we are going to discuss in this article.
You’ve smelled something that you think is nasty (alpaca spit?) and your response may be to say…”Oh, ICK!” and pull back your upper lip in a grimace. Did you know that this movement is the flehmen response?
The only problem is, that as humans, we do not have a jacobsen’s organ for our sent molecules to pass over. If we did we would get a lot more information about what we smelled. A quick sent of some smells is too much
information for us already but… back to our point.
Your alpaca has a jacobsen’s organ that is located on the roof of their mouth. The flehmen response helps transfer the scents to the organ. When spending time in your alpaca raising adventure, you may notice one of your male alpacas throw back his head and curl his upper lip at the same time when they are sniffing urine. What this does is seal the nostrils and draws the scent over the jacobsen’s organ receptors.
So what does this tell your alpaca? Well , it allows your alpaca to determine many things.
He can tell how long it has been since the animal has passed by and he can tell if this urine is from a female ready to breed.
If it was from an open female, he would seek her out and your alpaca breeding would be accomplished without help from humans.
You will probably notice this happening at the poop piles. Mostly males do the flehmen, but females have been seen performing this response, too.
Doing the flehmen also helps animals determine if the urine is from prey. If you’ve raised goats or horses, you’ve probably seen them perform flehmen behavior.
When alpaca raising, we as owners wish to control alpaca breeding and, therefore, the flehmen response is mostly just entertainment for us. We just find the behavior of our animals enthralling. The more you understand about your alpacas behavior, the more you know what is normal and what is not. That way you can care for them better.
