Is it really consent if they don't have a choice?

Carly Chandler-Morris
Apr 15
2 min read

In February 2025 I attended a training on CameliDynamics (and Animal Assisted Activity and Interventions) with Victoria Barrett of Simply Alpacas. I came home changed from the inside out.

An unexpected consequence of learning to handle the alpacas in a gentle and respectful way, was that it was teaching me how I can ask for the type of handling I need as a survivor of abuse and how we, as humans, can learn to accept each other as we are.

If you know nothing of Camelids and have arrived here, please don’t let the specifics put you off. Beyond the particular ways we work with alpacas and llamas this work can be universally applied to human relationships, particularly to parenting and in relationship and to other animals. Bear with me as I nerd out a little in what follows, it’s going somewhere I promise.

I started working with alpacas in July 2024 and became aware of CameliDynamics in the Autumn of that same year. Once I saw this gentle and respectful way of handling the alpacas, I couldn’t unsee it and I started working out how I could learn to handle ours this way. Without much money to my name, I decided to try to teach myself. It started by reading Marty McGee Bennett’s book the Camelid Companion, buying the equipment and giving it a go and after my first beautiful and profound experience with one of our girls, Annie, I was hooked. Standing beside her unrestrained, accepting gentle touch and both of us breathing calmly I knew I wanted to go deeper. I knew I wanted to be able to handle our whole herd in this way.

woman works alpacas ears using camelidynamics — Working Annie's ears whilst she stands calmy

I threw caution (and perhaps sense) to the wind and booked onto the soonest course available to me with no idea how I’d afford it. (Huge love and respect to Victoria for allowing me to pay in instalments). And after three days of hands on experience I returned home and began trialing some of the techniques on our herd.

The single biggest takeaway from my time with Victoria was consent. During the course when discussing halter training she asked, ‘is it really consent if we aren’t giving the animal a choice?’ I was really struck by this question.

Standard alpaca halter training is to corner the animal, grab them round the neck and hold them tightly whilst pulling the halter into the nose regardless of response. High priority is given to not ‘losing the fight’.

Using a CameliDynamics approach the work begins before we’ve even got our hands on the animal...