First the housing market collapsed. Now I fear the trade in llamas will be next
In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia.
Not that I am any sort of a spokesman. Llamas and alpacas have greater authorities than me to pronounce on their welfare and prospects. Wise and expert breeders in Britain constitute a community in which I’m a very minor player — indeed I fear my subscription to the Camelids Chronicle may even have lapsed. But regular references in national newspaper and magazine columns to our (until today) four llamas here in Derbyshire — their lives and loves, their setbacks, hopes and fears — probably add up to a substantial proportion of all published British journalism on these delightful, softfooted browsers. My writings may have done something to boost market confidence and customer interest in the characterful creature as a viable grass-mower and reliable breeding machine. And in markets of every kind, confidence is the key.
So my next remark is made fearfully. Shut your ears, ye bears of Wall Street, lest I do to the market for cloven-footed biungulates what George Soros did to the pound sterling, and Friday 12 September become a kind of Black Friday in the annals of the camelid trade.
For I think the bottom may be falling out of the llama market. Your share portfolio may have plummeted, your job may be at risk and your house may soon be worth a fraction of what you could have sold it for last year. Now your llamas may be depreciating too.
My evidence is anecdotal but for what it’s worth, it is this: over the years I reckon we’ve sold about a dozen young llamas, always yearlings. The camelid’s breeding habits are reliable: their gestation period is 11 months, and the females come into season on demand (as it were) because fertility is triggered not by the time of month but, as with cats, by the intimate attentions of a would-be father. This tends to result in a new baby every year. A decade ago we had no trouble finding buyers: a fine young female would fetch up to £1,000, a male less — but if prepared to take lower offers, you could always offload him.
About five years ago we noticed prices starting to drift down, buyers in shorter supply, and selling times lengthening. You might be lucky to get £800 for a female, and the boys were getting hard to sell at all.
This year is the worst so far. Ellie presents a problem. She shouldn’t because she’s a plump, beautiful chestnut-and-white yearling, named after the little daughter of a friend who was staying when she was born. But as Ellie the llama readies herself for customer inspection (and sidesteps the increasingly insistent attentions of her father) there’s been barely a nibble from buyers, even when I’ve explained that the price is unimportant if the buyer is right. Others report similar experiences. In fact, if you can find a buyer at all these days, I reckon £500 is now closer to the mark.
This is not a classified ad. A home has been found for Ellie: a llama-breeding friend is taking her in exchange for another female yearling, unrelated to my breeding male, Knapp; so Ellie’s not for sale. Instead, I write more in the way of an admonition to those contemplating llama-breeding as a route to profit, rather than the husbandry of a gentle pet with sweet, shallow eyes and a soft velvet nose.
We llama-breeders are not exactly in South Sea Bubble territory yet, but what I believe is happening should be a warning to those livestock speculators whose only reason for buying is that they want to multiply and sell. About a decade ago people invested in ostrich-farming for similar reasons, and the ostrich business came close to pyramid selling: the price of the ostriches acquired depending on an estimated demand for their progeny — the second generation — which in turn depended upon the likely demand for the third generation. Ostriches lay many eggs and, each generation being more numerous than the last, the market depended upon an infinitely expanding base of Britons who wished to be ostrichowners. But the number was finite.
As, sadly, is the number of my fellow citi zens who might ever wish to keep llamas; there’s a natural limit and I think we may be reaching it. Camelids don’t do well in tower blocks, they wreck herbaceous borders, they need at least half an acre each and anyway, because they are herd animals you have to keep at least two. An only llama is a lonely llama.
So it was inevitable that what we now call a ‘market correction’ in camelid prices would happen and I’m certainly not asking Gordon Brown to intervene by getting the government to buy up unsold stock, or offering special shared-equity llama-loans. The shake-out in the market will still leave thousands of dedicated owners secure and content with their woolly friends, while eliminating the fly-bynights — and it’s worth indicating what kind of people are likely to constitute this enduring core.
A few will still be breeding for profit, no doubt. Some will be farmers who want guardllamas for their sheep and lambs — llamas really do drive away dogs and foxes. One or two will run llama-trekking ventures, urban zoos, and the like. There will even be a few golf-course owners who want a grass-cropper or cart-puller with chamois-leather feet, and no hooves to wreck the turf; and the bored or ultra-patient may keep a camelid to pluck or shear, selling the laboriously spun wool for more than it costs to import it from Bolivia.
But the core will be — or should be — the kind of small country landowner who doesn’t want to be a farmer, needs a grazer that will mostly fend for itself, knows that horses and ponies are picky grazers and won’t touch nettles and thistles, that goats don’t respect fences and hedges, and who ends up asking a neighbouring farmer to put a few sheep into his or her fields, just to keep the pasture cropped. Sir or madam, llamas are for you.
Ellie left this afternoon. She made a hell of a racket kicking around in the horse box, and her mother, Imp, was distressed to see her daughter carted away. But Ellie’s not going far — to pleasant pastures by Carsington reservoir — and, since a month ago, Imp has had the patter of tinier camelid feet to keep her busy. Ghost (white face) was born on 8 August. And I have told her mother that every llama is precious, though almost worthless. It’s the sort of paradox a llama understands.
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