When we first added sheep to the small holding one of concerns that we had was that there was quite a few foxes in and around the local countryside. This caused us a concern at the risk that we could lose some of the lambs and considering that we were just starting out to build our flock of Balwens we needed to look at how we could protect the sheep and lambs.

At the time Anne came across an article about how the Australians had been using Alpacas to help protect their flocks. it showed how they integrated into the flock and how they actively protected the sheep. It was a cracking article and it gave us an idea, the only stipulation was that you must have Alpacas as a pair.

So armed with the information we went looking for a pair of Alpacas and a short time later we came across a pair that had been companions to a couple of horses but needed to be re-homed.

Enter Moss and Gordon, our new flock guardians, a task that they have taken very seriously for the last 14 years.

Unfortunately earlier in the summer Gordon passed away and this left Moss on his own, while he had the company of the Ryland Sheep, particularly Boris, we could see that he was spending quite a bit of time on his own, so the decision was taken to get him another Alpaca for company.

So meet Mario, he is from an near by Alpaca centre and is a “retired” treking Alpaca. (we didn’t want to get one that was too young).

So the first concern that we had was to make sure that he would be alright with the sheep, and then the second was to see how Moss reacted to this new arrival.

So Mario quickly settled in with the sheep and has been no trouble with them. As for Moss, it appears that Marion is slowly wearing him down (in a good way) Mario likes to follow Moss around and while Moss was a bit wary of Mario there was no spitting (Alpaca spit stinks by the way!) or kicking. Over the last couple of weeks we seen Moss being fairly tolerant of his new Oppo (Friend), and Mario is starting to settle in quite nicely.