Dressing an eye injury

I just thought I’d put together a quick post about a problem we had today, it may help other breeders with the same issue.

When we first checked the maternity paddock this morning we noticed that one of our new babies had a problem with one of her eyes, it was weeping a lot and attracting the flies. We seem to have a lot of problems with eyes and grass seeds and always keep a tube of antiseptic eye cream on hand for problems like this.

On closer inspection though we found that she had a nasty little nick in her top eyelid.

We treated this with antiseptic, but the problem remained of putting a dressing on it to avoid corneal abrasion during healing and to keep the flies away. Anyone who’s had to put a head dressing on a cria knows how hard it can be to do anything that will stay on.

So we tried a different approach and, so far, it seems to be working.

We used a knee length stocking

Trying it on for size

Ears out and a dressing pad over the eye.
Tape at the muzzle end to stop it slipping up

No awards for best dressed alpaca...

Her mother had no problem accepting her back after a couple of moments hesitation.

I'd love to know what caused the injury though.