I was reading recently about the high incidence of accidents on farms. That article was talking about accidents that happened to people. It didnt mention about farm accidents that affect animals. We learned first hand about that in early June, and it happened to one of our favorite alpacas, dark fawn Brown Eyed Girl.

Brownie was born in 2002 and was the second cria born on our farm. She was too weak to nurse her first two days. We hand-milked her mother Rose and supplemented that with goats milk, and Brownie did very well. The hand-feeding brought out all our protective feelings, and this cria became special, even though she progressed normally from there. This June, at nearly three years old, Brown Eyes had her first cria, a robust little girl we named Alexander's Heart of Gold, who we call "Goldie". Brownie was an awesome mother and we felt like everything was about as perfect as could be.

But when Goldie was a week and a half old, Brownie had an accident that injured her left eye. We have a lot of Black Flies here in New Hampshire in May and June, and our girls suffered from them in their small barn, especially the dark-colored ones. Brownie and the rest of the females wouldn't even go out to graze. We often saw them rubbing their heads on things to free their ears and faces from the evil Black Flies. On one Sunday, I saw the whole group outside in a grove of underbrush, scratching themselves. That night at bedtime check, I noticed Brownie had her eye closed and it was teary. In the dim light under the overhang, I couldn't see much, but I figured she'd been bitten on the eyelid or had gotten a fly in the eye. I told my husband Dick, We'll have to see how it is in the morning and if it isn't better, call Alfred (our vet, Dr. Alfred Famiglietti). I then proceeded to stay awake half the night worrying that this was the week Alfred was heading to a seminar. What will happen if he is away?

First thing the next morning, I checked on Browns. From a distance I could see that both eyes were open. Oh goody, I thought. But when I got closer it was very obvious that her eye was injured. It looked like something blue-ish was in the corner and the rest of it was actually purple, not brown. I ran into the house and with heart pounding, dialed the vet. I explained the injury to the technician who answered and was totally releived when she said, Oh that sounds serious. I'll call Alfred right away. Phew, he wasn't away at a seminar. Not long after, he arrived and examined Brownie. By then I knew she couldn't see out of that eye, as when I had haltered her and led her to the catch pen, shed bumped into a post. The vet immediately put drops in her eye to numb it and then looked into it with the same kind of an instrument optometrists use on us. His response after looking at it was, I'm sorry guys. She's punctured her globe. The blue color I'd seen in her eye, was actually the inside leaking out of the slit. Our vet then called the ophthamologists at Tufts University Hospital for Large Animals in Massachusetts, to get input from them.

Dr. Isabel Jurk (pronounced "York") thought there might be a chance to repair the tear in the globe, so suggested we transport Brown Eyed Girl to Massachusetts that day. Alfred was all for it, but later told us he was pretty sure that first day that her eye was too serious to save, but wanted a specialist to see it. He gave Brownie a shot of Banamine for pain and injected Naxcel, an antibiotic, directly into a vein. We then loaded her and Goldie into our cargo van and headed south.

The folks at Tufts were wonderful. I was so emotional signing in that I could barely write, but everyone was calm and friendly and sympathetic. Brownie and Goldie were taken quickly to an examining room and Dr Jurk and her student assistants were very calm and quiet around the two alpacas. After examining Brownie's eye, Dr. Jurk very quickly advised us that it appeared beyond repair and our best bet was enucleation, or removal, of the globe. It would prevent infection and the chronic pain that would occur even if it healed up. Surgery was scheduled for the following day, and we sadly left her and her small cria in a big stall next to some horses, and returned north. An ultrasound of the eye taken before surgery showed the iris prolapsed and the retina detached. It confirmed that we'd made the right decision to remove the eye.

It was pretty clear to us what had caused this awful injury: Black Flies, who love dark colored alpacas, and some sharp object used to scratch the itchy face and ears. The next day, we moved all of our girls up to the big barn, which is darker, and much less buggy. Black Flies don't like dark places. The boys, who are all, but one, white, were put down in the smaller barn. They immediately went out to graze and seemed not to be overly bothered by the bugs. We went around both barns, looking for sharp objects in the stalling areas, and removed or blunted them.

We went down and picked up Brownie the day after her surgery. After a week on Banamine and Naxcel, Alfred took her stitches out. Her dark fawn color masks the missing eye and most visitors don't notice anything at all. She has adjusted to not seeing on the left side, though she still occasionally bumps into things or goes too close to things on the left. She is not a jumpy alpaca to start with, so doesnt start when we approach her blind eye. Years of working around horses programmed me to approach on the left. But Browns doesn't seem to mind when she suddenly feels me on her left side. Lucky us, for that part, anyway...

About a month after her accident, I was wandering the pasture and looked into the grove of saplings and underbrush where the girls used to scratch themselves. Hidden by underbrush and its green color, was an old metal post, put there years ago when goats were on the property. Hanging off the post were two old insulators with a nail poking out of each. As Dick was pulling it out, we found a tell-tale wisp of dark fawn fiber stuck to the post, near the bottom insulator.

Though we have removed everything we can see that might cause eye injury, we know it is impossible to make any farmyard completely safe. Accidents do happen. You just do your best to prevent them. We use fly predators to control certain flies, and since Brownies accident, have added Muscovy ducks, who are reputed to love dining on mosquitoes and those evil Black Flies. We have done our best to try to prevent any more bug-driven accidents like that which took our Brownies beautiful brown eye.

Lana Nickerson, Foss Mountain Farm Alpacas, Eaton Center, NH

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