Another viewpoint from Natasha James Wesuri Alpacas Our journey with embryo transfer began in 2005 with mum and I travelling to Montana to be taught by Llama breeders Paul and Sally Taylor. Paul and Sally had adapted the Bovine ET procedure to suit the South American camelids and were more than willing to share their knowledge with us. We became good friends and I have since returned to Montana several �mes to catch up with them, work on their embryo freezing research and let them know how our ET is progressing. They in turn have been to Australia and worked with us here in Western Australia and presented at the Interna�onal Alpaca Conference in Sydney. Since then �me has flown by and I have in turn become an alpaca ET teacher here in Australia as well as in the US. I have taught veterinarians as well as breeders the process of ET. I have been to the US several �mes since the breeders voted to include the registra�on of ET cria in their registry, to teach and undertake ET for breeders, which has been a wonderful experience. Word has made it to Europe about my ET business, and I have been invited to Germany to undertake an ET program with a breeder there. Unfortunately, due to covid, that has been postponed un�l 2021, but there are s�ll many breeders around the world that are keen to undertake ET and fast track their herd improvement program.
Jude Anderson (Pucara Intl.) and Rhonda Deschener (Tierra Prome�da Alpacas) in the US working on their new ET pathway under instruc�on from Natasha James (Wesuri Alpacas).
ET has worked wonders for the sheep and ca�le industries here in Australia allowing the fast tracking of quality gene�cs by using females as ‘studs’. We all have those females in our herd that are wonderful mothers, but are not the best gene�cally, they can be an invaluable resource carrying the babies of those females that are gene�cally superior. Those excep�onal females that cannot carry babies or tend to be poor ‘doers’ during pregnancy could s�ll have babies without the stress of carrying them to term. Those females that you would love to see combined with more than one male but are too impa�ent to wait those couple of years to see which ma�ng has the best result, that female can have cria to each of those males in one season….. We all know that the dam contributes more than her fair share of quality gene�cs to the offspring, we should use that to our advantage and fast track herd development through ET.
Jude Jude Anderson from Pucara alpacas se�ng up to look for embryos. Al and Jude were pivotal in changing the US registry encouraging people to embrace ET and as a result the US breeders had a vote in 2016 and ET cria were finally allowed onto the registry. 24
