Public plea for 1-month-old alpaca that has disappeared from an Ontario farm

A Kingston farm is missing a baby alpaca, and the owners of Willow Pond Farm have now reported it stolen.

They’re asking for the public’s help to get her back. said Darren Van Winckle, one of the owners of the farm.

Van Winckle is a dentist by day and farmer by night. He told Global News in an interview Monday that last week, he and his wife went on a short trip to Toronto and left their animals in the charge of a part-time farm hand.

While they were away, one-month-old Fergie simply disappeared from her pen where she is kept with her mother Celia.

Van Winckle says the farm hand, who also has a day job, didn’t check on the alpacas between Monday night and late Tuesday evening, so the disappearance happened sometime during this time.

He said there were no obvious signs of entry from any predators, and no gates left open. They combed the field around the farm with the tractor, then had their field hayed, but there were no signs that little Fergie might have been dragged away by a predator like a coyote.

Van Winckle said he and his wife started going through all the possibilities of what could have happened, and thought it unlikely that the young alpaca would have wandered away so far on her own.

“One-month-old babies are not wandering away from their mom. They’re standing there and they’re whining as close as they can to them to try to get together,” Van Winckle said.

He also noted that the field is fenced in, which would have made it difficult for the infant animal to escape.

They came to the conclusion that there’s a possibility the baby was snatched while they were away.

“Maybe somebody came down our laneway while we were away and while Megan wasn’t there and took Fergie,” he said.

The farmers reported the disappearance to police and put out a post on social media, in the hopes that if someone has stolen Fergie, or even if she is found, she could be returned to her mother with “no questions asked.”

“She does need her mom’s milk still. She’s only a month old,” Van Winckle said.

Kingston police say the incident was reported to them and an investigator was assigned, but did not give any more details about the matter.

Van Winckle admitted that although they suspect a theft, they really don’t know what happened to little Fergie.

“A happy ending would be nice. An answer would be nice because again, we just don’t stop thinking about it. It keeps you up at night,” he said.