camels or

They were used to carry people, supplies and wool, and as draft animals pulling wagons and coaches and whipping water from remote wells.  They gave us a tradition in camels that no other western country has.

With the advent of motor vehicles in the early 20th century, redundant animals were cast aside: turned loose to roam the outback.  These were the seed-stock of what is now the only wild camel population in the world, currently estimated at around 1,000,000.

Such numbers are not sustainable.

“In high numbers camels can have a severe impact on waterholes and the fragile vegetation around salt lakes,” said Dr. Glen Edwards, a camel expert and researcher with the Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Arts in Alice Springs .

“They are selective browsers and can hit individual species such as the quandong pretty hard, stripping the trees bare.”

In the eyes of many the solution is not only culling, but includes commercial harvesting and, dare it be written, the commercial running of domestic herds. 

Five years ago there were probably only 600,000 feral camels in Australia when I wrote an article posing the question, ‘camels or cattle?’  Camel industry insiders were enthusiastic about the prospects of their product: there was great, untapped potential; markets were growing; demand far outstripped supply; and the only thing holding it back was the lack of transport capacity and a Halal accredited export abattoir.

Camels in stock yards ... is this a sight that we'll be getting used to?

In the interim, it appears nothing much has changed apart from the explosion in feral camel numbers across arid and semi-arid Australia and an increasing frustration of those whose vision for an economic and environmentally sustainable camel industry is constantly thwarted.

Back then, Pete Siedel was the Chief Executive Officer of the Central Australian Camel Industry Association based in Alice Springs .  He was confident that the camel industry could be a viable alternative to cattle production in the more marginal parts of the central Australian rangelands.

“Absolutely!” he said at the time.

“We already have producers running camels instead of cattle on their more marginal country and that will only increase.”

Pete was overseeing the live export of up to 300 camels per shipment to a client in Malaysia and had a single Saudi importer who wanted thousands per year.

Then…the Cormo Express!

The discovery of a ‘high’ percentage of scabby mouth in a shipment of live sheep to Saudi Arabia in August 2003, and the Saudi’s subsequent freezing of all livestock trade with Australia , put a huge spanner in the works of the camel industry’s export plans.

According to Pete Siedel, the industry was on track to export at least 3,000 head before the Cormo Express docked at the Saudi port of Jeddah .

“It’s difficult to rebuild,” he says.  “It takes a long time to get the quarantine facilities in place and to re-establish protocols and Memoranda of Understanding.”

A further spanner in the works was the withdrawal at the end of June 2006 of financial support for the Central Australian Camel Industry Association.  In the meantime, the association is being run on a volunteer basis and continues to explore market opportunities for its members.

On a more positive note, world demand for camel meat far exceeds supply and there is no chance of that changing in the foreseeable future.  Even domestic consumption has increased, but the real market is off-shore.  To meet that demand, Australia needs investment in an export accredited abattoir that can also kill animals in the traditional Halal method of the Muslim religion.

A passionate advocate of this and other camel infrastructure development is South Australian camel expert and ecologist, Phil Gee.

Vastly experienced and knowledgeable about the dromedary camel, Phil is now project officer for a camel management project with leading consultancy agency Rural Solutions SA and the regional South Australian Arid Lands and Alinytjara Wilurara natural resource management boards.

Phil Gee has been, and remains, a staunch supporter of a commercial camel industry but says, “The truth is, commercial harvesting alone is never going to solve the feral camel problem.

“We need to control feral camels decisively and sensibly, but whatever we do, we should not cut off at the knees any hope of a camel pastoral industry…it should not be discounted.”

While the economic drivers to turn pastoralists from the traditional cattle to camels are not yet there, Phil is also doing work to build the basis of an industry with a lot of economic and environmental opportunities.

“My interest in camel pastoralism is purely ecological,” says Phil.  “The big question is: how do we make it profitable for landholders?

“The camel is soft footed and doesn’t tend to break up the soil; doesn’t graze down groundcover; is extremely drought resistant; you need far fewer watering points which in turn, give less support to feral cat and fox populations; and overgrazing around watering points is minimised because they spend far less time at the water.  But like all livestock, numbers need to be managed”

In conjunction with BHP Billiton’s land management team, Phil is also operating a small ‘Camels in Pastoralism’ trial program on Stuart Creek Station, west of Marree.

Five years ago, they had 50 camels; now there are 350 with about 50% being captured ferals.  Phil says the trial has demonstrated the camels’ manageability in a domestic environment, their respect for fences when trained, and their capacity to weather the hard times without excessively compromising pasture or browse.

“Our camels were fat when everyone around had trucked their droughted cattle away.”

But it’s all about economics, and the figures don’t stack up for camels, not yet anyway.

There is also significant opposition to the commercialisation of camels, and smart operators like Phil Gee acknowledge that there is a need for wider knowledge of camels.  There will be different rules for camels, and different obligations and responsibilities for management.

The public is constantly calling for better outcomes for biodiversity – for the land in general – and a preservation of those all important wilderness values that seem to be constantly disappearing.

Phil claims that despite the concern that camels can sometimes target species such as quandong, if we leave cattle in the rangelands, the net biodiversity loss will be far greater than with camels in their place.

“We have to get away from viewing the camel as only a pest and see it as a resource too,” he says.  “If we can do that, we’ll get a far more balanced approach to the issue.”