In a desertifying world short of water, the
utilitarian camel, and the ancient cultures that
depend on it, offer a way to use land too poor to sustain anything else.
The camel has long had a special place in the
imagination of the West, from the Greek historian
Herodotus telling a story about Indians using
fast-running camels to defeat dog-sized,
man-eating ants that guarded gold, through the
Three Magi journeying to Christs birth, Lawrence
of Arabia and the desert chic of Camel cigarettes.
At school you probably learned that the dromedary
(shaped like a D) has one hump, and the bactrian
(shaped like a B) has two (all very orderly). But
perhaps you dont know that in the first week of
their foetal life, all baby camels have two
humps. Or that the worlds camel cultures are in
crisis. Some camels are threatened with
extinction. Others are being slaughtered as
pests. Modernity, urbanisation and motorisation
are slowly destroying a way of life that has survived for thousands of years.
I recently asked a colleague at London
Universitys School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS), Stefan Sperl, to describe the
place of the camel in the Arab imaginative
landscape. He said that pre-700 AD, pastoral
Bedouin poetry (still highly esteemed in the
Arabic and Islamic literary canon) expressed a
deep emotional bond between poet and camel. Camel
journeys in this poetry have philosophical
meanings about the journey through life to death
naturally so, because in the harsh desert the
camel is integral to family and community life.
But now camels are being viewed as vermin. Last
November, under the headline "Town under siege:
6,000 camels to be shot", the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation reported that trains of
camels had invaded the town of Docker, breaking
into houses and rooting up water pipes.
<http://mondediplo.com/2010/07/20camels>Link