| The Walking Lightly Difference | Alpaca Facts & Information | Alpaca Sales and Services | Livestock Guardian Dogs & Predators | Colorado's Gold Country | Find or Contact HS Alpacas |  |
| The Walking Lightly Difference | Alpaca Facts & Information | Alpaca Sales and Services | Livestock Guardian Dogs & Predators | Colorado's Gold Country | Find or Contact HS Alpacas | |
Alpaca ranches are perfect settings for using nonlethal predator controls to protect their alpacas. Sheep and cattle ranchers tend to run thousands or tens of thousands of animals on thousands of acres. Lambing and calving are often done far away from the safety of a barn and without human participation. Alpaca ranchers have fewer animals and keep them on smaller acreages, in fenced pastures, closer in, and more closely monitored.
After years of working with both wildlife preservation groups and agricultural stakeholders on the concept of protecting livestock without killing all the predators (particularly coyotes) in an area, it has become obvious to me that there is no one answer. Lethal controls have been shown not to work, despite men's best efforts. And the most effective use of nonlethal controls means using a combination of those controls:
The particular combination will relate to the particular ranch. For instance, there is a difference in protecting animals on open range and in a feedlot. To develop an effective plan of predator control, one must take into account:
In short, an effective plan for predator control will differ for each farm, whether it be the lush pastures of Oregon or Pennsylvania, the desert terrain of New Mexico, or the high plateau of Colorado.
