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Ah, a subject near and dear to my heart. Some breeders get totally up in arms about crossbreeding. A few think they should be banned from the registry and put on the dinner table. Others don't understand what the uproar is all about. To be fair, most breeders don't practice crossbreeding - and one of its biggest proponent has sold his suris to concentrate on huacayas.
The original idea was to make colored suris, increase the numbers of suris and introduce what genetists call hybrid vigor - the crossing of two populations (in this case, suris and huacayas) to produce increased performance (usually things like fertility and survivability) in the offspring. Another "benefit" of crossbreeding was the ability to ascertain if a male was homozygous or heterozygous for the suri fleece gene. More on that later.
I have a cross bred. It is not a purchasing decision I took lightly. I was aware of the controversy, but am not persuaded by peoples prejudices, even (or especially) when large amounts of money is involved.
Lets start back in South America. The rumor is that huacayas were added into the suri mix in South America when the locals figured out that the gringos paid a premium for colored suris (most were white). Imported alpacas have no verifiable ancestry, so one will never know.
Now lets move to the United States. Many suri breeders think of suris with huacaya in them as inferior. What they are neglecting to tell people is that many of their high powered, high selling males have huacaya in them. The problem is that it is not on the registration paper, so they can deny it. But the fact remains - if your $300,000 "world record", $10,000 stud fee male has a sire or grandsire who produced huacayas, there are huacayas somewhere in that males background.
It is very easy to plug a few numbers into the Alpaca Registry database and look up the ancestry of those famous males. And they have produced huacayas.
Nola Graham, the women behind the NGG farm identifier seen on so many suris these days, told me that her very famous male, Uribe, got loose once and bred some huacayas. The sky didn't fall. He still made fabulous babies for years after. And if she didn't already know, those suri crias out of huacaya dams helped prove (to as much of an extent as statistics can) Uribe was a homozygous male. This article explains in more depth the latest thinking behind the Mendelian inheritance pattern of the suri phenotype. It also explains why a F1 suri cross is useful to help determine if a male is homozygous for the suri fleece type. Note: this article is written by Bill Graham, who was married to Nola at the time many of the original suri imports. They owned most of the big name original imports. More about Bill and his ranch, Old Trails Alpaca Company, here. My suri male came from Bill, and I co-own Orion with him.
This is an article written by Mike Safley. It is factual, without any of the hand wringing or drama in some of the discussions on the subject.
As Mike mentions, Australia has been crossbreeding for some time now. Andy Tillman did a scanning electron microscope study of many fibers, and has this to say about the 3 crossbred suri samples he received from Australia - "they are phenotypically suri and would not be out of place in most colored suri herds in the United States". The complete article can be read here -
http://www.tillmanllamas.com/alpacasArticles/Alpacas%20Magazine%20SEM%20for%20web.pdf
Once again, back to Bill. He writes something in this article that alpaca breeders of either type need to keep in mind - "I would like to say a suri alpaca is determined by it’s fleece." Animal breeding is all about improving the next generation. Many people start with mediocre huacayas and are not ostracized because they are "breeding up". Actually, owners of males who make dramatic improvements on those old style females use it as a marketing tool. Why should those who elect to start with cross bred females and breed them up be any different?
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