Alpacas biggest one-day sale to be at Borderway

Pat Bentley with her Syke House alpacas

The biggest one-day auction sale of alpacas in the UK will be staged in Cumbria in September when one of the country's pioneers Pat Bentley holds a major reduction sale.

The sale will come under the hammer of Carlisle auctioneers Harrison & Hetherington on Saturday September 13 at Borderway Mart, Carlisle.

Pat Bentley, a founder member of British Camelids, the British Alpaca Society and the British Alpaca Fine Fibre Co-operative, plans to take a " second" retirement to spend more time with her family and the sale will be the fruits of her efforts over the last two decades.

The Syke House alpaca herd was founded 20 years ago by Pat Bentley, at Newby near Penrith and this genuine reduction sale will include proven breeder females and first time calvers with calves at foot and back in calf, a stud male, yearling males and females and some geldings.

Syke House weanlings

The sale will mark the results of years of carefully breeding quality fibre producing animals. The majority offered for sale have been bred at Syke House. This major reduction sale will leave Pat Bentley with a small, select group of breeding alpacas which she could not be without.

" In the 20 years I have been involved with alpacas, I have been concentrating on breeding animals that are reproductively reliable and to get good fleeces and strong conformation to equip them for a long healthy life," she said.
" The culmination of that is that all females in the sale will be proven to be good mothers, easy calvers and have a consistently early return to the male."

Pat Bentley had decided to breed alpacas when she and her husband Bill retired - she had first seen the animals when on holiday in Peru in 1974 and she pioneered the breeding of the animals in the UK. Although her initial instincts were heart-led, after the first year of keeping the animals at Syke House and discovering how easy and cheap they were to keep and how much high quality fibre they produced she decided to try and introduce them to Britain as a viable fleece business for British farmers.

To speed up the drive to get ever finer fleeces and true colours without sacrificing conformation, Pat Bentley has imported alpacas from Chile, Peru and North America. Pat is convinced that fibre production from alpacas in the UK is here to stay and that there will be a viable future for the industry once numbers are built up to meet the obvious demand for this unique luxury fibre.

From her pioneering efforts more than two decades ago, the national herd has increased to 8,000 animals, but UK production is still behind the interest in Australia, North America and Canada where alpaca fibre production is now big business, as it is in South America. Fibre is a bulk business and Britain needs many more alpacas still.

Syke House alpacas

Included in the sale is one of the two imported stud males which are predominantly responsible for most of the yearlings and weanlings which will be in the sale. Chisa Araquipa is a mid-fawn nine year old stud male born in Chile. His fibre analysis of 2001 had a M (micron) count of 24.37; SD (Standard Deviation) of 5.5; CV (Co-efficient Variation) of 21.5; and a percentage of fibres over 30 microns of 11.

" The males have excellent conformation, high libido and very dense fleeces together with the very distinctive type they pass on to their offspring," said Pat Bentley.
"The females to which they have been bred are mostly British-bred with a few Chileans."

The majority of animals in the sale are the mature females numbering around 70 which are all under nine years old and are all proven breeders and good mothers with dense fleeces. A further group of females on offer will be in-calf for the first time. Among the 10 yearling males there may be animals of stud quality. A further group of geld males range in age from four to 12 years old would make a nice park group or companion animals and they are good fibre producing animals.

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