Coyote Blog

The primary reason is that camels are a feral pest in Australia.

As Gil observes, camels are indeed feral nuisances in Australia, but if this were truly about "protecting" the environment, they would shoot rabbits, a far worse problem there.

Maybe abortion clinics can start applying for carbon credits now.

As noted above, camels are a feral pest in Australia. They eat plants that would otherwise sustain native creatures. Camels are huge, the food that supports them reduces the capacity of the landscape to support other creatures. Remember that Australia is mostly desert - it takes a long time for vegetation to recover from the depredations of a herd of camels. Furthermore they destroy fences, drain and pollute waterholes, break the natural crust of the desert leading to increased erosion.

Re rabbits : Australia spends a lot of money on attempting to contain rabbits : biological (virus) attacks, shooting, gassing, digging. Rabbits are indeed a terrible pest here. Camels are, however, due to their size, easier to locate and target.

There are many invasive non-native species here in the US. Here in Florida, and elsewhere in the South, there are armadillos. They dig up vegetation, damage underground utilities, and get smashed on the highway with regularity. I'd like to get carbon credits everytime I accidentally run over one of those varmints.

Now of course, on the other end of the cuddly scale, wild mustang horses are non-native to the Americas, having escaped from the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago. I'd just like to see some enviro-weinie wrap an argument around issuing carbon credits for shooting wild horses.

Camels are an introduced species, and apparently a pest (I don’t go the Central Australia enough to personally know). My understanding is they rank somewhere behind rabbits, wild pigs, cats, goats, cane toads, foxes and possibly water buffalo, but before wild horses, dogs, and most introduced species of birds on the exotic pest list.

While it would be nice if none of these animals had ever been released, it has happened, and there isn’t much to be done about it. We can try to control the numbers (like we do with kangaroos which are culled in large numbers most years – the numbers of many species have exploded with modern farming), but we will never get rid of them.

I like camels, and they do a lot less harm to the environment than foxes and especially cats, plus pigs, which kill and eat a huge variety of Australia’s (mostly small) native wildlife.

To kill camels is by no means the dumbest thing done in the name of global warming, but it is dumb all the same. It will be a lot of cost for any gain – does anyone seriously believe Camels are causing global warming? Seriously?

It is valid to want to manage Camel numbers for environmental impact reasons as they compete with native animals. What really annoys me though is there may well be a commercial approach. It might need government assistance to get going (not a popular idea on this blog, but it is a measure to meet a government environmental objective) with the intention to phase it across to a private operation asap. Camel meat and products are a traditional staple through the North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia. The problem is, there are no more wild camels (except, well guess where?) and domestic herds are rare.

If New Zealand can package up Chinese Gooseberries as Kiwi Fruit and make them popular (albeit Kiwi-bear, meat from possums introduced from Australia, which are a huge pest in NZ, didn’t work so well), there has to be a decent chance for a camel meat market. With all the nostalgia for the 7th Century in the Middle East, how could it fail? We already sell live camels to the Middle East (for racing and mount stock).

Find a way to make it profitable, and the problem (ie camels) will get brought under control. Germany, for instance, imports most of its Boar meat (ie wild game rather than domesticated pork) from Australia. Its not enough to keep pig numbers under control (although it all helps), but then there are a lot fewer Germans than there are in people in North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia, and a lot more pigs than there are camels.