Robert Irwin - Camel

Phoebe, do you believe that your favourite animal says a lot about you?

You mean behind my back?

An exchange between Rachel Green and Phoebe Buffay in the US TV series Friends

This is a book about the one-humped and two-humped camel. Throughout the book I shall be referring to the first as dromedary and the second as Bactrian. Purists may object that strictly speaking dromedary should refer only to a racing or pedigree camel. The nineteenth-century desert explorer William Gifford Palgrave tried to sort out the terminological confusion:

The camel and the dromedary in Arabia are the same identical genus and creature, excepting that the dromedary is a high-bred camel, and the camel a low-bred dromedary, exactly the same distinction which exists between a race-horse and a hack; both are horses, but the one of blood, the other not. The dromedary is the race-horse of his species, thin, elegant (or comparatively so), fine haired, light of step, easy of pace, and much more enduring of thirst than the woolly, thick-built, heavy-footed ungainly, and jolting camel. But both and each of them have only one hump.

Dromedary derives ultimately from the Greek dromos, meaning road, or course. But in practice dromedary is so widely used to refer to any kind of one-humped camel that that particular terminological battle has been lost. As for Bactrian, this refers to the region of northern Afghanistan where two-humped camels were once plentiful. (But I do not think that there are any there today.) In order to remember which camel is which, it is helpful to think of the D of dromedary as lying on its side, producing a single hump, while the B of Bactrian on its side produces two humps.

Le Dromadaire from the Comte du Buffons Natural History (17991800).

This is my first book in which scientific matters are at issue. I am startled then to find how much contention, vagueness and sheer lack of research bedevils the scientific study of the camel. For example, how many stomachs has a camel got? The fascist camel vet Arnold Leese said three. The HMSO Camel Corps Training Provisional (1913) was firm that the there are four stomachs. Jibrail Jabbur, an authority of the way of life of the camel-rearing Bedouin, in refuting the idea that the camel has five stomachs, implied that it had four. The historian Edward Gibbon guessed five. Most modern authorities favour three. Among palaeontologists there is no consensus as to whether camels first appeared in the early, middle or late Eocene era, nor any awareness that variant opinions have been expressed. There are very different estimates about the length of time it takes a dromedary to copulate. Some authorities make the doubtful claim that the dromedary cannot copulate without human assistance. Wildly differing opinions have been expressed as to whether camels can show affection for humans, or whether they are intelligent. There are also quite a few guesses as to when and where camels were first domesticated. I have done my best to pick my way through all this and present what seem to me to be the best guesses.

What is it like to be a camel? How does the camel experience life? Does it take thought for the morrow? What is it like to live in a space that is to a large extent shaped and defined by its smells? How would it be to spend most of ones year utterly Any careful contemplation of the animal world inevitably raises the unanswerable question, what is it like not to be human? But in the chapters which follow easier questions about the camel will be tackled.