Shelter for Llamas
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Shelter
Llamas may be tough, but they require shelter in all but the mildest climates. In hotter areas, a breezy shelter provides essential shade. In windy and rainy areas, llamas are usually very quick to take advantage of available shelter (there are exceptions, such as llamas who have been trapped and/or abused in shelters). In rainy areas or in climates with heavy snowfall, shelter is essential to provide llamas with a dry place to kush and stand, thus minimizing damage to foot pads, the opportunistic fungi that love llamas' undersides, and various unhealthy conditions that can be lumped under the catch-all category of "rain rot."
Shelter can be simple or elaborate. The essentials are:
dry flooring
two and preferably three solid sides aligned against the prevailing winds
40 sq feet per llama minimum floor space (that's assuming that all of the llamas in question are compatible) with a minimum size of 8x8 for a single llama.
a minimum interior height of seven feet (taller is OK).
Most people find that having a place to feed hay under shelter is ideal, but that also means an increase in the necessary space to keep squabbling and fecal soiling of spilled hay to a minimum.
You may have heard that llamas won't soil their shelter. Although exceptions do exist, the vast majority of llama owners agree that llamas actually prefer to defecate and urinate in the privacy of their barn! It is possible to pick the area you'd like the llamas to use for a toilet and train them gradually to use it, although this is virtually impossible in crowded conditions.
Although you may think bedding makes the shelter look all snuggly and warm, bedding is rarely preferrable. Unless recently shorn, llamas' coats usually keep them quite warm enough, and bedding actually makes sanitation a much greater effort. For the few times when bedding is truly necessary or desirable, always use straw, and clean it every day or more often before feces get scattered below the bedding and necessitate bedding removal and replacement (all that straw is bulky and not an easy matter to dispose of).
For flooring, packed dirt or clay are both very good; rubber mats with either small holes for drainage or an open area for the "toilet" is as good, but much more expensive. Normal-sized gravel ("three-quarter minus") and round rock are both impossible to separate from feces, but pea gravel (if you can find it) outstanding flooring because it can be packed flat and it allows urine to drain off; it also won't mix with straw or hay. Turf is also good for short-term displays and open-sided, summer shelters -- but don't expect the grass to last very long.
Whatever you do, never bed llamas on wood shavings, wood chips, and avoid sand as flooring material. Llamas gleefully roll in all three. The bedding material is quickly ground into the animals' coats, and feces and urine are thoroughly mixed with bedding in the process, creating amoniac, unsanitary and unpleasant living conditions within a very short time. Although sand can be blown out of the coat (over several days and with effort on your part) after the llama is removed from the source, a single roll in shavings results in tiny wood slivers and splinters remaining for as long as a year, ruining the fleece (of fiber producers) and making all llamas very uncomfortable. For that reason, also keep wood shavings and wood chips out of llamas' pastures!
You will greatly appreciate having lights in the llama shelter (particularly if you work dayshift), and having both lights and an electrical outlet (with weatherproof covers and on a GFI circuit for safety) can prove invaluable in an emergency.
A gate to close up the shelter and keep the llamas inside proves to be very handy, and can in fact be the best way to catch marginally-trained llamas, particularly if you feed in the shelter. We also have at least one gate in each shelter that usually stays against the wall, but can be swung out to divide the shelter area so that a sick llama can be kept in familiar surroundings, yet safe from aggressive or concerned pasturemates while still allowing those other llamas access to adequate shelter in inclement weather.
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