When we first started breeding alpacas, we were told we had to do pregnancy tests right after breeding and then every once in a while during the pregnancy. After several years and a little experience, we adopted a very different philosophy. By the end of our career as alpaca breeders, our philosophy was only to test if we were ready to act on the results of that test. Are we ready to breed the alpaca if the test comes back negative? Will the numbers in that contract change based on the results of a pregnancy test? If you’re not ready to act on the results, there is no point in conducting a pregnancy test.

As an example, we had a maiden female bred at another farm one fall. Starting about four months after breeding, the stud’s owner started contacting us asking if we’d done a pregnancy test. We were asked if we wanted to know if the alpaca was pregnant. Of course we wanted to know for sure she was pregnant, but what were we going to do with that information?

The sire’s owner continued to press us for a pregnancy test all winter. We kept saying no. We don’t have facilities for winter cria, so we don’t breed until May. If the January test comes back negative, we’re still not going to breed until May. True, we know and we can plan and we don’t need to do another test, but we’re still not going to actually do anything until May. If the January test comes back positive, what does that mean? There are myriad ways for an alpaca to lose a pregnancy, so a positive test in January is no guarantee of a pregnancy in May. We’d have to re-test in May, anyhow.

Because the animal in question was pregnant for the first time and because we weren’t sufficiently familiar with her reactions to be comfortable with behavior testing, we eventually had a progesterone test done – in May when we were ready for a re-breeding if necessary.

Our testing program evolved to be very minimal. We tested just before the beginning of our two breeding windows. Any animal that wasn’t pregnant got bred. We t hen bred on a ten-day cycle until the animal showed obvious behavioral signs of pregnancy. Many breeders test at the end of the breeding window. How would we use that information? Either the alpacas have gotten pregnant during the breeding season or they haven’t. We’re not going to act on the results of a negative pregnancy test until the next breeding season, so why test until then.

I think I would perform a progesterone or ultrasound test at the end of a breeding window if I thought one of my animals was having difficulty getting pregnant for medical reasons. If she’s not pregnant, I need to know so I can start veterinary follow-up. If she is pregnant, I’ve basically wasted the test, but the test is cheap relative to the cost of a female alpaca going sterile because of an untreated uterine infection.

In my opinion, pregnancy testing is something that’s only useful when you’re ready to use the information. Many breeders do a lot more testing than we did and spend a lot of money doing so. I think much of this testing is unnecessary. By the end of our tenure as alpaca breeders, we did much less testing than we were taught to do in the beginning. It’s something we learned over time, and it comes down to only spending time and money to acquire information when you are ready to act on that information.