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Australia's `feral camels' a threat to the environment

Australia's worst drought in a century is driving even wild camels crazy with thirst and hundreds of thousands will have to be eradicated, researchers said yesterday.

The desperate animals would need to be culled on a huge scale or exported for slaughter to prevent increasing damage to the environment and infrastructure, the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Center said.

Camels "mad with thirst" recently rampaged through the Western Desert community of Warakurna, damaging toilets, taps and air conditioners in a frenzied search for water, said the government-funded center.

"An estimated 1 million feral camels -- whose numbers double every eight years -- compete with native animals and livestock, threaten native plants, wreck fences, bores and tanks and invade Aboriginal sites," the center's Glen Edwards said.

"Camels have been an emerging problem over the last decade or so, but the latest drought has focused camels' attention on certain parts of the landscape and brought them more into contact with people and their activities," he said.

Feral camel experts from around Australia are due to meet in Perth today as part of a project to develop a national plan to control the humped beasts.

"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of camels that need to be removed from the system," said Edwards, an ecologist with a government wildlife department.

While some could be exported live to markets in the Middle East, Russia and parts of Europe for human consumption, or turned into pet meat, culling would be unavoidable, he said.

"Provided culling is done by people who are professional and well-trained, it is deemed to be probably the most humane way of managing camels -- a quick death," Edwards said. "In some respects, it is better to do that than to muster the animals up, put them on a truck and cart them 1,000 kilometers to an export port."

Edwards said the preferred method of culling would be to shoot the animals from helicopters.

"It is an enormous task but it may well be a task that does need to be undertaken. We do have people with the skills who can do that sort of management at that scale," he said.

The single-hump camels, or dromedaries, were introduced into Australia as pack animals for the vast outback in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but were released into the wild as rail and road travel became more widespread.
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