A treat for tourists in the Outback town of Alice Springs is an early morning camel ride with top cameleer Marcus Williams.
In the business for 20 years, he takes some visitors out riding overnight and even lines up camel transport for wedding parties. There are dozens of businesses like Pyndan Camel Tracks across a continent that has around 1 million camels on the loose.
The first camels were imported in the 1840s. Over the next 60 years around 10,000 arrived in Australia to work as beasts of burden. The coming of motor vehicles in the 1920s rendered them obsolete and they were simply set free to roam the red center.
Alison Anderson, who also calls the Northern Territory home, is at the other side of the equation from Williams. To her, camels are feral animals, pests.
“They go into houses and they smash the taps, and anywhere where they can smell water they will absolutely destroy the pipes and the taps and the toilet bowls, and they are just destructive,” Anderson said.
But what to do about them is proving to be problematic.
The continent is so big and its infrastructure so spread out that plans for turning camels into pet food have foundered. Camels are more intelligent that cattle and sheep — and that makes them harder to manage.
As with kangaroos, Australians seem loathe to make a meal of camels.
“That’s the key to the whole problem,” said Central Australian Camel Industry Association spokesman Peter Siedel.
“Consumption in Australia will never amount to enough demand to make an impact on the numbers that are there now, so we really need to develop the overseas market,” he said.
Despite the huge numbers — and a population doubling every nine years — annual shipments are around 25,000 animals. They go mostly to the Middle East.
In some jurisdictions, camels are shot from the air, and simply left where they fall. It’s hard work. They are hard to spot from a helicopter because their brown fur blends in with the hues of the sandy deserts. They don’t stay in herds, either.
An abattoir has been set up in Alice Springs, but mustering camels is hard work too.
“Industry and government can join to create an economically and environmentally viable industry employing indigenous people to help resolve the feral camel problem,” said camel expert Phil Gee.
But what’s most likely to happen is what happens now: a mish-mash of culling and animal husbandry, each jurisdiction going its own way, everyone talking about the need for a concerted approach but nothing much being done to achieve that.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS