Feral Beasts

The Australian Government's Current Feral Camel Management Program.

Surprise, 1,000,000 camels are roaming the Australian desert. They’re the great, great grand-children of imported pack animals that helped build our rural power and rail networks. Set free at the advent of the petrol engine, those animals took to their new home with gusto. For the camel, Australia’s vast tracts of inhospitable wastelands turned out to be a smorgasbord of thistles, weeds and prickly acacias, food that native animals wouldn’t look twice at. Throw in their legendary ability to go for days without water and it’s no wonder they now outnumber koalas by 10 to 1.

Good for the camels right? Wrong. With the exception of white people, introduced species have a big stigma in Australia. Cane toads, European carp and feral pets have killed or out-competed many native animals. As if guilty by association, Australia’s camels are the focus of a large scale eradication project. Thousands are being tracked, shot, and left to rot in the middle of nowhere. Unlike kangaroo culling, camel eradication has barely raised an eyebrow. Even conservation groups seem to accept it as a measure to protect local species. The other way of looking at it however is as a total fucking waste of camel meat.

Paddy McHugh is a leading camel expert and exporter. We called him as he was preparing a load for Kuwait.

Vice: How’s the camel business, Paddy?

The market for the animal worldwide is unbelievable. Since Christmas time, I’ve had enquiries from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, as well as Malaysia and Taiwan. And that’s just the tip of it really. A few years ago, we had the Crown Prince of Dubai’s private plane fly out—we put 35 camels on it and it flew back.

Is there anything good about Australian camels in particular?

We’re the only country in the world with wild camels, and a very big population of them too. We have a good strain of camels, bigger, fatter and stronger than the ones from Pakistan, Somalia and places like that. Also, we’re a stable country and we can access them

relatively

easily. And I think the people overseas are struggling to find them. The Muslim world eats camel like we eat cattle and sheep.

This is Paddy gazing at a prize winning beauty competition bull worth $4 million dollars.

Do you eat it?

I eat it fairly regularly, if we’re mustering we may have some camel meat. I don’t kill the animals unnecessarily.

We’ve put a couple through the abattoirs and it’s lovely meat. You wouldn’t tell the difference. Fifteen years ago we had Mike Willisee and

A Current Affair

come up to film. We cooked up the same cuts of camel and beef, the cuts are very similar, and we cooked them up exactly the same way and we never told them what it was. They raved about it. It’s really beautiful. And then we told them.

The old blind test eh. What else is camel good for?

There are strange antibodies in the blood which they say could revolutionise a whole range of different cures.

The milk has the greatest potential though—it’s high in vitamin C and has all these funny little things which are great for immune deficiencies in children. In the Middle East, you can get camel milk off the supermarket shelf. They estimate that the camel dairy industry is worth $10 billion.

That much?

Well a camel alone sells for about $1,200 a head. Unfortunately the government sees the camel as a feral animal and doesn’t recognise the potential. They should be domesticated and farmed like cattle and sheep. We’re an arid land, in fact 70% of Australia’s land is classified as arid. Why aren’t we farming arid animals? Camels can be farmed alongside cows quite simply. The forage overlap is only about 20% and they’re easy to muster. You need slight modification to your yards and trucking, but otherwise it’s a piece of cake. If you look at our farming industry, camels could raise the bottom line by 20 or 30%. And we shoot them as a feral animal. I just think it’s a disgrace.