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Thurs. 29th June

Posted on 29/06/2017 by Nigel under Bonheur Banter

     Ok, what did I say the day before yesterday about busses?………well, I had to leave the ‘memsahib’ on ‘cria watch’ yesterday whilst I went up to Paris with the other Nigel for a meeting with the Minister for Agriculture, unsurprisingly not in person but his ‘Chef du bureau,direction géneral de Alimentation, sous direction santé et protection animales’……..they do like their titles!…….why? you ask would we want to fight our way around the Paris metro system to spend an afternoon in a hot,stuffy meeting room on the umpteenth floor of a faceless office block filled with sombre grey suited government civil servants generating reems of official paperwork to drown us mere peasants in……Good question. Well, a year or so ago a Decree was slipped in below the radar, as in not well publicised and became law this year that all ‘Camelids’ (camels,llamas,alpacas) must now be on a  register with the french horse society for traceability for health protection (why a horse society??,wadda they know about camels?!)……..ok, a registry is good, it is needed I can see that but we already have a European alpaca & llama registry which most of us use as it is free, just make it compulsory to register, end of problem.

    Aah, No, it’s an independant register so the government have no control over it and wouldn’t get any revenue either……..No, we must pay the horse society for each alpaca/llama we have and pay our vets to health check them every year and micro chip them,as this is a specialist veterinary job that only a vet can do and then do the registration via internet…. like the vets have got the time to do this! with french supplied and approved chips only, even though most of us breeders are perfectly capable of chipping them.  So, we were there to put forward our case as to why we think this is an ill conceived and implemented law and we’re not up for playing this game. I for one am not paying my vet a lot of money for doing something I am quite capable of doing and have been doing for years now so if the minister would like, I am quite happy to microchip him just to show him that I can do it and then he can go and ‘get registered’!!

Sorry………I’m going off on one aren’t I, it is the frustration of spending hours banging ones head against a brick wall of bureaucratic blinkered reasoning, no compromise, no common sense allowed!   Anyway, where was I?…….Oh yes,  busses coming at once wasn’t it…. well, whilst we were swaning around Paris  two of the pregnant mums, Sioux and Brooklyn both gave birth at the same time in the middle of a thunderstorm and Sioux had problems birthing…….and Evey was on her own!

 


Sioux  looking a bit grubby from rolling around on the floor trying to birth her young boy, luckily neighbour Laurel came over to help Eve with them. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to have much milk so we’re bottle feeding every four hours or so for the moment.

     

 

 

  Brooklyn had no probs and popped out a strapping girl, she’s white under the dirt camouflage honest!

 

 

 

 

 

Outside to dry off a bit between showers.

 

 

 

 

A better shot of Tasha’s girl,ten days on, looking good.

 

 

 

 

 

And another shot of Trisca’s ‘black face lamb’ or was it “I knew I should have put the lid back on that paintpot”!

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