Middle East demand for healthy Simpson camels

As Australian camels have never been exposed to the diseases that plague captive herds in the Middle East, Gulf nations pay a premium to import them as some of the cleanest breeding stock in the trade.

Australian animals have long been sold there in small numbers, into racing and breeding stables, where fresh bloodlines and a clean bill of health are both hard to source locally.

That’s being reported by Space Daily, an online magazine in Tokyo.

It reports that Australia has the largest population of wild dromedaries anywhere on earth, “a herd nobody planned, nobody owns and nobody can properly count”.

The Aussie camels – actually dromedaries because they have only one hump – are free from the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, a coronavirus that jumped from camels to humans and kills roughly a third of the people it infects, reports Space Daily.

“It is thoroughly established in herds across the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation notes that every primary human case has been traced back to that same region.

“A survey of local and imported camels at Jeddah found antibodies in 92.7 per cent of the 1,399 animals tested. Living virus turned up in the noses of roughly one in six.

“Australian animals have long been sold in small numbers into Middle Eastern racing and breeding stables, where fresh bloodlines and a clean bill of health are both hard to source locally.

"Small is the operative word."

An economic analysis for Meat and Livestock Australia put global trade in live camels at 200,000 to 300,000 head a year at average prices near US$400, while Australia’s cost of getting one animal into a shipment ran from US$1,000 to US$1,500.

“Mustering wild camels out of the Simpson Desert and trucking them to a port is expensive work. Air freight is worse. Those numbers only stack up in high-value niches, and the report pegged Middle Eastern breeding stock at roughly 150 animals annually."

PHOTO: Middle Eastern camels have two humps.