Fleeced

‘We’re off to breed alpacas!’ said the farewell note left by the previous owners of Garden Cottage.

It was the exclamation mark, I think, that really annoyed me. Like those fay hand-written notes on the doors of craft shops reading ‘Back in 20 minutes!’ As though the owners' lives are so much more frenetic and spontaneous than mine, with people constantly whisking them off unexpectedly. Whilst I, by contrast, have nothing better to do than lurk around their shop fronts, waiting for them to come back and sell me something.

‘Off to breed alpacas!’. There’s a lot of it about. A few years ago, domestic alpacas were a rural novelty (‘Did you see those llamas? Weird!’). Now they're pretty much the norm. I can think of half a dozen serious breeders within bola-hurling distance of the village.

Except they’re mainly not quite serious enough (!). Animal husbandry is hard work, and no matter how cute the animal, making it pay takes actual skill.

There are around 16,000 alpacas in the UK and around 3 million, give or take a few, in South America. Barbour-clad ex-bankers with 3 acre smallholdinsg and loads of bubbly enthusiasm are competing with Bolivian peasants in a flappy hats one whose livelihood they are trying to muscle inand who, their families having been doing this for centuries, know a thing or two. An economy whose other key exports are pan pipes, worry dolls and marching powder will always undercut the burgeoning UK alpaca market, especially if that market is being operating is a spirit of Enid-Blyton-esque gung-ho and '!'

A 2006 paper published by the University of California concluded that in the US ‘the [alpaca wool] industry represents the latest in the rich history of speculative bubbles in agriculture’. We’re talking tulip bulbs here, in other words, if not actual South Seas.

If there is money to be made, it’s in not in alpacas present, but in alpaca futures. A pregnant femailealpaca covered by a prize-winning male (these males must be massive – it would take a tarpaulin to cover a whole alpaca) can fetch up to £25,000. this is interesting, when you consider that a pregnant human Marketing Manager is actually considered less, not more, desirable by most UK employers. No added value is actually attached to the putative extra Marketing Professional nestling within the Managerial womb. Alpaca babies, unlike human babies, have investment potential

Alpacas are pretty creatures, if you like the ‘wide-eyed baby’s head on improbably long neck’ look as recently pioneered by Alex Wek and Lily Cole.

That may be a good enough reason to breed them. Trying to foist alpaca wool leg-warmers on the innocent public at £40 a pair is, alas, not.