Well if you like watching paint dry then ARI is the organisation for you.

The EPD issue was first raised into the consciousness of the AOBA membership in January 2008 and so in the last 9 months what has happened?
Well apparently ARI have developed an EPD Survey...... but hold on a minute because the AOBA survey is coming along soon.

Confused? You will be......there are two surveys. The Ari survey is about EPD's the AOBA survey about Strategic Direction....now I wonder why Tim McCarthy just resigned from the AOBA board?

The ARI site which is generally well constructed and designed contains no reference to the EPD programmes running in North America or in other countries for alpacas. Doesn't that strike you as odd !

And the list of potential traits is exhaustive there is no chance and I mean no chance of ever tracking so many variables across a large and meaningful virtual alpaca herd.

All you do by listing out so many traits is confuse and set expectations that will never be met. Plus there are traits listed which are derived from other traits which strikes me as a illogical.

If you ever wanted a great example of what happens when a committee puts together a survey this has to be a classic.

There is no mention of us ever seeing the results from this survey all we will ever see is the carefully crafted summary...why am I not surprised....

If you are serious about Alpaca EPDs then visit the EPD Library which contains a comprehensive set of articles on EPDs including the alpaca programmes that are currently running both here and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

I think anyone who is interested seriously in EPds for alpacas and has the discipline to gather and report the data already belongs to the EPD programme that is already running in North America thanks to Virginia tech and is producing EPDs for the alpacas that are in the programme.

To be honest I think the EPD train left town some time ago....