Huacaya

Alpacas were domesticated in Andean South America from the vicuna, and they have been kept for fiber there for thousands of years. They reached the wider world late. Imports into the United States, Australia, Canada, England, France and New Zealand all date from the 1980s.

That short history is why the American herd is a known quantity. The Alpaca Owners Association has validated the parentage of every new registration by DNA since 1998, and used blood typing before that. As of September 22, 2026 its registry holds 203,699 alpacas in the United States.

No other species in this catalog has a registry that genotypes every animal in it.

Adults weigh 106 to 198 lb and stand 32 to 39 inches at the shoulder. Gestation runs about 350 days and almost always produces a single cria.

The fleece is a single coat, unlike a llama's, and it is finer. A shearing yields roughly 5 to 10 lb, of which 50 to 90 ounces is first quality. Twenty-two coat colors are recognized, running from white through the fawns and browns to true black and the grays.

Crimp is what separates the Huacaya from the Suri, and it is measurable: 15 to 52 degrees per millimeter, averaging 32. Sheep wool runs 60 to 127, so alpaca crimp is a gentler wave than a fleece buyer used to wool will expect.

The number that sets the price is fineness. The most frequent measurement in United States Huacayas is 30 microns, and fiber under 30 microns is what buyers pay for. Staple length matters too: about 100 mm is typical here, and commercial processing generally needs at least 71 to 101 mm.

Alpacas are social herd animals and noticeably more herd-minded than llamas. They are handled in a halter, which is also how they are held for shearing, toenail clipping and veterinary work.

They spit when displeased. This is normal camelid behavior rather than a fault, and it is usually aimed at another alpaca.

They have nails rather than hooves, so foot care is clipping rather than trimming and shoeing.

Fiber, first and last. Alpacas are not a meat species here and they are too small to pack.

Some are kept as fiber animals in small flocks, some as breeding stock, and geldings are commonly sold as companions or as company for another alpaca.

Other alpacas. A single alpaca kept alone is the most common mistake made with the species, and being more herd-minded than a llama makes it worse for them than it would be for one.

Shearing every year. An unshorn alpaca in a hot summer is at real risk, and the fleece is the reason to keep the animal in any case.

Toenail clipping, routine teeth checks and a parasite plan.

In the eastern United States that parasite plan means meningeal worm specifically. White-tailed deer carry it without being harmed by it, snails and slugs pass it on, and in a camelid it causes uncoordinated movement, lameness, and eventually paralysis and blindness. Treatment is high repeated doses of anthelmintics with steroids and supportive care, it is very hard to treat, and it may fail. Prevention is the whole game: deer-proof fencing, clearing thick ground cover, and keeping animals away from where snails and slugs sit.

Ask for the histogram, and ask when it was taken. A lab report giving average fiber diameter, standard deviation and the percentage of fiber over 30 microns is the alpaca equivalent of a horse's height, and fleece coarsens with age, so a five-year-old animal's cria histogram tells you about a cria.

Ask for the AOA registration. Because parentage is DNA validated, a registered alpaca's pedigree is verified rather than asserted, which is unusual and worth having.

Ask what the animal is for. A show-quality Huacaya and a pet-quality gelding are the same species at very different prices, and a buyer who wants lawn ornaments should not pay for fleece statistics.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.