by Alex Tinson
It also tells you a lot about how a country is run. Singapore, for example, has a sensational zoo: well-kept and clean. Go to India and you’ll see something entirely different. On one visit to Delhi’s zoo I was standing outside the cobra cage, indulging my snake fascination. No-one else was around and one of the staff asked if I would like to see the giant cobra close-up, for a small fee. He brought me into the cage, got out a broom and began poking the sleeping snake. The next minute this mighty four-metre king cobra had reared up, head level with mine and hood in full flare. I said, ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’
That episode told me you could make anything happen in India by passing on a bit of cash. In Havana’s zoo, I have seen a local sitting inside the crocodile enclosure with a fishing rod in his hand. That was a sure sign of how tough it was to get by in Cuba.
So it boded well that David Taylor, the original great of the zoo vet world, was here. That chance encounter with my hero convinced me this was truly my destiny.
In fact, in out of the way Al Ain it seemed suddenly that all things were possible for a secret zoo vet like myself. When I walked through town and down to the markets I discovered a delicious surprise—or something quite alarming, depending on your perspective. Al Ain was home to a wildlife market, where you could acquire pretty much anything your heart desired: a cheetah, a baboon, snakes, lizards, a crocodile. Whatever took your fancy, it was there.
This was something you would never see in Australia; the law simply would not allow it. But the desert Arabs have a rich history of trading, bringing in all manner of goods from Africa and the rest of the Middle East, so animals were just part of that. I was still living at the hotel so couldn’t take anything back from the markets with me. But I made a mental note of what was on offer for later, when the time came to turn our house under construction into a real Tinson home.
It didn’t take long for word to spread amongst the local Bedouin that the western experts had arrived. Things might have been different if we’d been brought in, say, as engineers to build an airstrip. Jobs like that required knowhow that didn’t exist in the UAE. The locals readily appreciated that there were things foreign experts knew that they didn’t.
But camels were something else altogether. Our business was very much their business and it was hard for us to simply go about our work unnoticed. And the locals had every reason to be sceptical, even resentful. The Bedouin had developed an intuitive knowledge of their camels, which can only come from thousands of years of living together with the animals.
It was all very well to be parachuted in as the world’s leading camel vet, as Heath had sold me, but what did I really know? I had up my sleeve this thing called ‘western knowhow’, but I was already aware that it was painfully inadequate. Sure, I had castrated Paddy McHugh’s camels and been in charge of an endurance race, but they were outback Australian camels that had evolved in the wild to become big hulking things that could carry massive loads. The Arabian racing camels were a very different beast, only half the size of their Australian cousins and much more slender, like a greyhound.
The racing camels I’d seen were no wider than an average person at the shoulders. They had a tiny waist, and with this narrow waist they had very fine legs, more like the great Ethiopian runners. To get it in perspective, an adult female camel in the Middle East might weigh in at four hundred kilograms. By comparison, a decent-sized Australian camel is six to seven hundred kilograms while a racehorse is up to 550 kilograms.
The difference is that in Australia there had been no selective breeding, whereas the Bedouin Arabs have been breeding for speed and endurance, because they wanted to ride in battle or make a fast escape. In traditional times they needed to get across the desert quickly, so they were always looking for faster, stronger camels. It’s been selective breeding all the way to produce a very fine-boned mix of speed and endurance.
I’d researched what I could on the health and ailments of camels but had found very few articles. One reason was that camels are so resilient there’s been nothing much to write about. And of course, the camel had never attracted the interest of western vets in the way horses and cattle do. In fact, very little was known about them, full stop.
I also found virtually nothing in the literature to guide us on how certain drugs affected camels. We could extrapolate from other species, but that’s highly fraught: an anti-inflammatory that gives good results with a horse can be very toxic in camels, as it turns out. In fact, when it comes to drug treatment, the camel is nearly always different. What happens in a horse or cow didn’t necessarily apply. So it’s no understatement to say that I was feeling my way in the dark when it came to the racing camels.
Mr Zuhair arranged for Hamza to take all us Australian vets—Doug, Geoff and me—to visit one of the Crown Prince’s camel camps in the desert, a few kilometres outside town. In all there were fifteen camps spread around various places, as well as four breeding farms and over three thousand camels that we would have to get to know and work with.
The camp we were visiting held a herd of around a hundred camels kept in various enclosures that had been fenced off in a flat area of the desert. There were twenty or so camel handlers tending to the herd, filling feed boxes and water troughs, leading groups of camels from enclosure to enclosure. The men were from poorer countries, such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sudan. The youngest was probably about nineteen and the oldest maybe forty-five to fifty. The Pakistani men in particular would have grown up with camels and all the handlers lived here full-time, in quarters at the camp. They were here because it was a life that was better than what they could get in their own countries, which in a way applied to all of us.
We made for a small building near the camp entrance where we met the head trainer, a solid, no-nonsense Emirati man called Saeed bin Krause. Saeed was an Arab version of Paddy McHugh: he lived and breathed the animals and had in him the spirit of the wild. But Saeed also drew on centuries of knowledge, because the Bedouin culture had developed around the resilience of the camel. It was literally man’s best friend, if not saviour.
Saeed had been atop a camel from the age of two. He was reared with camels. As we wandered through the herd it seemed he had a sixth sense, which meant he knew how an animal was feeling that day, if it had energy or if there was an ailment which meant it wasn’t quite itself.
He was typical of the Bedouin we would deal with, who had learned the ways of the camel from birth. These were men who had the ability to identify a camel from the imprint of a hoof in the sand and tell from that how many hours had passed since it had crossed the desert.
This first meeting was an eye-opener for all of us. Saeed had never met a western vet before. He would have been curious to know if we had something special to offer. At the same time I was wondering if we had anything to offer at all.
On this patch of dirt and with these beasts, Saeed was king. Even though we were here with the authority of the Crown Prince, for us to do our job effectively we needed the support and goodwill of trainers like Saeed and, indeed, the camel handlers themselves. And, as in thoroughbred horseracing, it was absolutely vital to get the relationship right between vet and trainer. There just had to be mutual respect.
However, the local Bedouin trainers didn’t necessarily trust us. They weren’t hostile to us, but they were resistant. There were camel doctors here who relied on a tradition that stretched back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. We were outsiders and brought with us new methods that were seriously at odds with those customs. It didn’t matter to them that through us they would have access to some of our advanced medicines. They employed natural treatments that had been passed down through the ages and been validated by experience.
Prior to our arrival, the camels were treated with Bedouin cures. One of these, for example, involved putting a burn on an injury, by using a red hot poker, as a way of ‘toughening’ the leg, not unlike the practice of pin firing, which was used to treat racehorses in the west bef
ore it was stopped in the early 1980s because it was considered cruel. They were also using herbal medicines such as the desert purgative harem bush.
The Bedouin trainers were suspicious of even the most basic surgery. A simple procedure, like lancing an abscess, was regarded with great suspicion and required much discussion prior to permission being given to proceed. As far as the Bedouin were concerned, if it couldn’t be given orally, it was suss.
There was also a real fear of reprisals should something go wrong. The animals were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and were being trained for members of the ruling families. How to explain if a new drug or a medical procedure went wrong and destroyed the camel?
Language was another fundamental problem. The Bedouin trainers barely understood a word of English. And of course, we couldn’t speak any Arabic, let alone the dialect of the desert. At one stage we tried to make light of the language barrier by having an English-speaking local translate some Australian colloquialisms—like ‘don’t come the raw prawn’ or ‘hit the frog and toad’—but the literal translations didn’t quite hit the mark and the whole attempt fell flat. Yet it was essential that we should communicate our ideas on treatments as well as our plans for research. It was also vital that we learn from the trainers and benefit from their knowledge of camels in general.
All in all, it was pretty clear that this wasn’t a matter of waltzing in with our medicine and taking over.
We raised this problem with Mr Zuhair. He heard what we and Saeed both had to say and, weighing up the arguments, decided that we needed to gain the confidence of the local Bedouin. They had to be convinced that our scientific approach worked. The solution was that before letting us loose on the Bedouin camels, we would have the chance to try out our techniques on twelve camels of our own.
At the same time we vets would have a go at being trainers for the rest of the camels and have the freedom to introduce new methods, as long as they didn’t involve medicine. It wasn’t part of the original brief, but this would give us time to get a feel for how the local camel experts worked. Simultaneously, we and our ‘advanced’ techniques were on trial with our own dozen.
It was a smart decision.
We were conscious that we were on probation and needed to make a mark. But while we felt the pressure to make quick progress, we were limited in the kind of scientific work we could do. At the moment we had nothing: no staff, no clinic. Just sand and the Hilton Hotel.
To get over the immediate language problem, Mr Zuhair assigned a full-time interpreter to us, a young man from Sudan called Bengawi. He had trained as an accountant, so he had to get up to speed with the language of the technical ideas we needed to impart.
We learned that the complex, when it was built, would be known as the Scientific Centre for Racing Camels. If our science was going to help make the Crown Prince’s camels faster, then we would need the equipment and the backup to make that happen. We had firm plans as to what we wanted to do. Right from the early days it was important that we be able to monitor the health of our animals very closely. We needed to be able to give our trainers same-day blood reports and understand how certain markers in the blood matched up with performance. It was also critical to accurately diagnose disease in an animal, so as to provide the correct treatment.
Our first aim was to analyse blood samples from all our racing camels and create the basic physiological data that was absent in the region. This would require labs with specialised equipment and personnel.
During the course of the Great Australian Camel Race, I had to know the physical capabilities of every animal, for their sake as much as the humans. I was constantly monitoring the impact of exercise on the blood and the heart, so now we fed this existing data into our early physiological exercise work with the camels.
A key means for us to measure this would be using a treadmill, common for training horses but never before used for camels. This would mean assembling a team of professionals from overseas, including world experts in horse exercise physiology and human exercise physiology, and drawing on research about marathon runners, amongst other things. The aim was to design and build specialised treadmills for the project, robust enough to carry a four-hundred-kilogram beast. The treadmills would be fitted with oxygen masks for the camels, which would allow us to measure oxygen uptake under stress.
All this would take time. Until then, we knew we would be tested on the little things.
Apart from Heath, none of us had family here, which in some ways helped our cause. Being by ourselves we had little to do other than work, eat, sleep, and then do it all again, out there with the camels from four in the morning to get the heavy work done before the heat of the day.
Not knowing a whole lot about Arabian camels, we applied principles that we knew worked with training racehorses. One of the most critical first steps was something very basic: going out onto the track with a stopwatch to measure the time it took for a camel to complete the six to eight kilometres of a normal race. Timings had never mattered to the local trainers. Winning the race was enough, and it didn’t really matter if it took fifteen or eighteen minutes, so long as you won.
But we were looking at it from another perspective: we wanted the camel to run faster. Pretty soon the Bedouin trainers started saying these stopwatches weren’t too bad after all and they began using them.
We also had a suspicion that the camels weren’t doing much running between events. It was common for the trainers to get the camel handlers to take the camels out for a five- or ten-kilometre walk. One day we discreetly followed behind this ‘training’ in a car and discovered that the camels were being taken to the nearest big sand dune, whereupon the workers would tie up the camels and have a snooze.
So we visited the industrial area that housed the Crown Prince’s workshop and garage, a set-up where we were able to get petrol between the hours of 6am and 1pm. There we made the acquaintance of a man called Yafour, an older Emirati who was able to conjure anything out of a bit of metal. We asked him to weld together a makeshift T-bar sulky, which we could put behind a car. Now we could have heaps of camels tied up behind the thing and drag them around for training.
We tried everything. The cattle prodder was introduced as a way to quickly get the camels into line for training; the idea of a small electric spark coming out of the end of a stick seemed to capture everyone’s imagination. This led to an amusing incident with a sheikh who was keen to have one of these for himself. We presented him with a prodder from Australia and showed him how it worked by tapping the top of a table with it. Zzzzt. Out came an electric charge. But this didn’t seem to satisfy the sheikh. He summoned an underling and told him to put out his hand. Zzzzt. The poor guy just about hit the roof. It seems the sheikh wanted to test out the limits before exposing his camel to anything awful.
Some ideas were weird and wonderful. With Heath’s background as a horse man we decided we should have a go at transporting camels standing up. So we asked Yafour to fix us up with a truck with a hydraulic lifter on the back where the camels could walk onto the platform and be raised up. Unfortunately that one didn’t take off because camels prefer to sit down. Indeed, they are designed to sit down, unlike horses, which are designed to stand up and have ligaments that lock their legs into that position. That’s why camels have those wonderful external pads on their knees and their chests, so they can sit in the desert sands for days without getting bedsores. The pads also help protect them from the heat.
So some things worked and others didn’t, but slowly we were revolutionising camel training. Most importantly, we got the attention of the locals and they were starting to see that we could get results.
We had a bit of fun with it, too. We named all our camels after famous Australians. There was Marjorie (Jackson), Betty (Cuthbert) and Shirley (Strickland). All the Bedouin came to know a pure white Sudanese camel we called Greg Norman, after the Great White Shark, who many of the locals had heard of. Greg and another camel we named Debbie
(FlintoffKing) were always amongst the winners. And come race day we Australians always had a good old laugh to ourselves to hear the race caller bellow out ‘Greg Norman’ or ‘Dame Edna’ amongst the Arabic.
All the while, Mr Zuhair took a special interest in how things were going; with us living at the hotel, it was hard to avoid him. He would take up his position in the café like clockwork at 6pm every day and was a fund of helpful advice.
We were clearly under the spotlight. From time to time we would be visited by higher-ups in the local hierarchy, who had been sent to report back to the Crown Prince.
Heath Harris had a line that summed up life here perfectly: the UAE is like a giant film set, he would say, and you are only as good as your last movie. It captured the truth that, along with the good pay and conditions, there was a demand to produce the goods.
Being hired as the camel vet didn’t mean that was all you would do. Part of the test in the early days was also to see how well we could build our relationships. We had to be flexible, prepared to do anything and everything when asked. And that’s how I ended up crossing paths again with the mountain lion that had made such an impression at the welcome lunch.
It turned out that the prominent local who strolled in that day, with that elegant but deadly creature on a leash, was not its owner. He had borrowed it for the occasion from an Australian mate of ours called Kent who was working for the US defence company Raytheon, makers of the Patriot missile.
The mountain lion was a gift to Kent’s family from the Crown Prince’s half-brother. It’s very hard to say no when a member of the ruling family offers you a gift, even something as unruly as a mountain lion. And having accepted it, it is equally hard to offload it. So what do you do?