OUR EXPERIENCE WITH ALPACA TRAININGYou've already done your basic alpaca training. Your alpacas halter and lead without problems. Now you're ready for more advanced techniques. We chose the click & reward alpaca training video with Jim and Amy Logan. Alpacas are smart and we wanted to have well trained alpacas. We watched the video. Wow! If our alpacas could do any of the behaviors they showed, we'd be happy. You use a clicker to cue your animals and reward them with their favorite food. First we had to choose a place to train. We picked our catch pen. It's confined and familiar. The next choice to make was which alpaca to start training. We chose a female who loves her treats. That would make it easier because she would do anything for a treat. Well, we soon discovered she would do anything but clicker training for a treat. She was too distracted about not being with her herdmates. So we moved her to a location where her herdmates were out of view but nearby. That made her more nervous. OK. So we picked the wrong alpaca to start. Yes, that was it. Our calm gelding was a better choice. Should have started with him. Off we go to halter him up. Same thing. We never could get the gelding to be any less distracted than the female. Do we just have untrainable alpacas? We decided to try clicker training on our labrador. He picked it up in two sessions. We figured we had the idea down if we could teach it to our dog. We just couldn't seem to get the idea across to our alpacas. We feel that clicker training is a good idea. But we think that a video just can't give you all the little tips like a real hands on session. We failed with this program and feel that the video was a waste of our money. That's not saying clicker training is bad. We just think handling alpacas is a special knack and that you really need live instructions on this technique. Our recommendation is to skip the video for alpaca training unless you use it in conjunction with live sessions.
Return from alpaca training to raising alpacas.
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