I think my husband forgot to mention...

This weekend was certainly one of the most exciting, interesting, and educating weekends we, as a family, have ever had, but I think my husband forgot to mention that in everything we had learned up to the show that we were never made aware of the fact that you can indeed give an alpaca the "heimlich maneuver"...and we did have to.

The morning of showing our boys, Alexander decides (as usual) to go crazy eating the grain. Apparently, he ate too much too fast and choked on it...literally. As we were sitting there beside the stall, Ashley lets us know that Alexander is foaming, so we look over our shoulders at him and see a little white foam starting to come out of his mouth and we are just assuming that he might be a little stressed. It happens sometimes. Before you know it, the foam is turning brown...never seen this before.

We are just looking at each other and back to Alexander, and luckily, the gentleman in the stall across from us, says "You know he's choking, right?" Immediate action begins now as the dumbfounded look on our faces tell him that, no we didn't know, and nor do we know how to rectify the situation. He jumps up and comes running into our stall and between him and Mike, they manage to work the grain out of Alexander's throat onto Oddyssey's head and back. Then he lets us know that we should give him a shot so that he calms down, he was generous enough to give us the medication and reassure us that our alpaca that was falling down drunk now would only be doing that for short period of time (he was right, but us noobies freak out at everything).

I would say the worst part of this, other than Alexander choking of course, was that he had to do it about 45 minutes before he went into the ring. I have always said he eats like a pig!