The other night I was watching one of my favourite movies, when I arrived at the point where the US soldier (played by Kevin Costner) is given his Sioux name, Dances With Wolves, and and I started to think through the alpaca names that we all dream up.

Many alpaca farms now have a prefix in front of the alpacas name. So all the alpacas born here will have the pre-fix MBY which is an abbreviation of Mulberry.

As for the actual names themselves we have decided to use song titles for our alpacas names. So we have a Moon River and Mr Bo Jangles and even Mr Tambourine Man...we are not the first farm to use these song titles for names but we are certainly the only farm to only use song titles for names. My thinking behind this was to have names that would immediately sound familiar....time will tell if this is worthwhile or not.

Some alpaca farms that have been around for years prefix-fix with the farm name. So Snowmass Alpacas will for example call an alpaca Snowmass Invincible. This is an excellent idea if you have been around for a good number of years and have established a distinctive look to your alpacas.

There is a school of thought that males and especially stud males should have macho sounding names such as King Kong or Invincible....but there is no hard proof that this is in any way beneficial.

At least one alpaca was named as a humorous response to an insult. When a group of breeders were called "blood suckers" one of the group just had to name his next cria Dracula!

Will we still be naming alpacas when there are 5 million alpacas in North America and the biggest farms have maybe 50,000 animals?

Almost certainly not. By then your run of the mill alpaca will simply have a micro chip number.

I think the alpaca world will be less colourful as a result..

So if you have song titles that would suit an alpaca let me know adrian@mulberryalpacas.com.

Adrian Stewart