Clearview Alpacas &

  Paco-Vicunas

There's a New Breed in Town!  And I am a Paco-Vicuna.

Yes, Paco-vicunas, or PVs for short, are fiber-producing animals in the Camelid family that are being bred to produce exceptionally fine, dense fleece.  In the long history of fiber, vicuna is well recognized as one of the finest fleeces in the world.  But vicuna fiber is slow growing, often only shorn about every three years.  The earliest alpacas were domesticated from the vicuna by the native South American peoples as long as 6,000 years ago.  The resulting fiber was so incredibly fine and soft that Incan Royalty alone were permitted to wear it.  After the Conquistadors slaughtered many of the major alpaca herds in an effort to control the local populations, the exqisitely fine fleece produced by the indigenous population was lost.  The remaining animals were often cross-bred with the llama

Kiana

population left on the high plains, before the major herds had recovered, and controlled breeding was reintroduced.  Over the intervening years, high up on the altiplano of South America, little bands of vicuna males would occasionally bred with alpacas, the resulting offspring usually remained within the local herds.  Some of the current PVs and alpacas in the U.S. are offspring of such camelids found up on the Altiplano.  We searched for animals that show evidence of these vicuna like traits and breed to focus the expression of these traits.  The resulting offspring can vary, often having the longer fleece length of the alpaca, but much more delicate in bone structure with larger eyes, and exhibiting the presence of more guard hair than most alpacas, particularly about the chest area and bib, but with very very fine dense fleeces.

Contact us to learn more about these amazing animals.