by Alex Tinson
Kent’s solution was to keep him in the backyard, attached to a runner chain. That way it could at least have a bit of space, however limited, to stretch out its legs.
This gave rise to a terrible practical joke that I once played on our driver. Hamza had driven Doug and me up to Kent’s house in Abu Dhabi for lunch one day and, in his customary way, said he would wait in the car until we were ready to return to Al Ain. I told him to come inside and join us to eat but he declined, pointing to a ‘Beware of the dog’ sign on the front of the house. I reassured Hamza, saying, ‘Look, there are no dogs, okay? Come on in.’
Doug and I walked ahead. Meanwhile, Hamza locked the car and followed us along the pathway down the side of the house. Suddenly he looked across and saw this killer sprinting at him at sixty kilometres an hour. It hit the chain and stopped about a metre away from him. He stood there, completely frozen. ‘Well, Hamza,’ I said, ‘that’s not a dog. That’s a mountain lion.’ I’m not sure that Hamza saw the funny side of it.
As it grew older, that sleek little mountain lion started getting a bit more rambunctious, until one day he bit off the tip of Kent’s right earlobe. That wasn’t great for Kent, but at least he now had a good enough reason to have a word with the sheikh and let him know the puma had become a bit of a handful. Kent proposed that the cat be sent to the zoo at Al Ain and the sheikh agreed.
And that’s where I got involved, receiving a call asking if I would please do the honours. I jumped in my car with Doug and headed up to Kent’s place, throwing in a blowpipe and a dart gun in case this manoeuvre called for my old sedating skills from the lion park days.
The mountain lion was still only ten months old and, having spent much of its life around humans, it was still just possible to handle him like you would an excited dog. I got Kent and a couple of others to hold and play with him while I quietly drew a couple of ccs of sedative drug into a syringe. I managed to slip a fine needle in without him noticing and fifteen minutes later he was out cold.
Doug and I took one end each and put him into the back of the Landcruiser, ready for the trip back from Abu Dhabi. Job well done—or so we thought. An hour or so later as we made it to the outskirts of Al Ain and were stopped at traffic lights the people in the car next to us started waving and pointing madly to the back of our car. We turned around to see the mountain lion now awake and attempting to scramble over the rear divider into the back seat.
Thankfully, though, he was still groggy. We figured we had just enough time to get to the Al Ain zoo, about ten minutes away across town, and dump the lion. But by the time we got there, it had gone 8pm and no-one would let us in.
Now we didn’t know what to do. Here we were, feeling a bit ridiculous, with a dozy mountain lion on our hands, becoming more alert by the minute, and nowhere to take it. The only place to go was ‘home’ to the Hilton. We presented ourselves at reception and, using my best straight face, I asked if there might be an extra room available, for the mountain lion. The bloke at the desk just looked at us. We knew it was probably not out of the ordinary for someone to walk into the hotel with a cheetah or something similar, but maybe taking a room was a step too far.
We were still in negotiations when a call came through from the zoo. They must have heard we were working for the sheikh, so someone opened the zoo and we were able to get over quick smart and drop that mountain lion off before it was fully alert.
That’s the problem with animals from the wild. They are, in the end, wild.
Our small group of Australians held regular brainstorming sessions where we looked at every possible angle to improve the performance of the Crown Prince’s camels. We drew up a page with arrows going everywhere, and in the middle of it was Sheikh Khalifa.
Our ultimate benchmark was Dubai and, in particular, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the son of the then Ruler of Dubai. At that point, Sheikh Mohammed was probably both the leading horse owner and the leading camel owner in the world. His facilities were absolutely world class and he had attracted the best Arab trainers.
We were left in no doubt about how intense the rivalry was between the two city-emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Though a mere 120 kilometres or so distant from each other, the two had only recently been joined together under one flag. Three decades before, when I was a little kid running around the yard at St Ives, Abu Dhabi and Dubai had been at war over territory, a formal compromise only coming in the late 1970s. In the desert timeframe, this was like yesterday.
There was no getting around some very basic arithmetic. It came down to this: Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai had ten thousand camels—and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi had three thousand. Just working the straight percentages, if you assume that two per cent of all your camels are going to be champions, Sheikh Mohammed was always going to be ahead of us.
For all the marvellous new training techniques we’d introduced, we were still fiddling at the edges. We were on the lookout for the one big idea.
It was Heath Harris who, in typical fashion, came up with a belter. Heath is one of those people who left school at fourteen but has more ideas than anybody I’ve ever met. There might have been a few weird ones but, out of ten, maybe three would be rippers.
‘Why don’t we just try embryo transfer?’ Heath ventured. The rest of us highly trained vets were dumbfounded: this was something that had never been done before.
Embryo transfer is a tricky business. You have to be able to superovulate an animal so it produces a large number of eggs. We vets knew that this had not proven possible with horses. At the very best a mare might produce three or four eggs when stimulated, but this was not enough for a reproductive program. And we had assumed the same would apply to camels. To which Heath said, ‘Well, too bad—I’ve already told the Crown Prince that we can. So we’re going to do it.’ Nothing like making scientific history on the run.
There was an ironclad logic to what Heath was saying. We needed a bigger herd and the way to do that was to breed faster from the existing herd. Yes, you could go out and simply buy more camels. But the beauty of embryo transfer is that you can breed from the gene pool of your best camels.
It was also a way to increase the number of babies a good female might produce in its lifetime. With a gestation period of thirteen to fourteen months, the camel is incredibly slow reproductively. As well, a female racing camel might only have six years or so of reproductive life, given that it is customarily raced up to the age of ten or twelve years. The female is superior to the male when it comes to racing. It’s not just that they are faster: the males tend to be more temperamental and harder to deal with. Hence the females have longer racing lives. We did the numbers and figured out that if embryo transfer worked, we could produce the equivalent of twenty years of breeding in just one year. It was clear that this could hold the key to catching up with our rivals. We could breed selectively from our best animals and try to speed up the whole process of genetic selection. The race just might be won in the lab.
We couldn’t experiment on the Abu Dhabi camels, some of which were worth a million dollars or more. The risk was too great that something could go wrong. The only way we could test Heath’s theory was to experiment on camels that were available in large numbers and it wouldn’t matter if things went wrong. This, naturally, pointed to the wild camels of Australia.
We had also heard on the grapevine that Dubai was considering the idea of collecting Australian camels for their own research purposes. We didn’t believe that this would include embryo transfer because it was such a left-of-field idea but there were other reasons they might want to look closely at them. So the competition was on.
We put the case to Mr Zuhair and he agreed. Given the interest Dubai was now showing in Australian camels, our operation was to be conducted in secret. Only a handful of the most senior Emiratis would know the details of our moves to pioneer reproductive technology for camels.
One of those was Aylan bin Abdallah Al Muheiri, who had been a bodyguard of Sheikh
Khalifa. Now head of the Crown Prince’s personal security and a trusted confidante, Aylan had good knowledge of camels.
We had been only been in Al Ain for eight months. Patti, Katya, Erica and little Natalia had been there for half that time and we were all shacked up in the Hilton while our family home was being completed The next thing I was on a plane heading for the desert of Western Australia, and then to my old stomping ground in western Queensland to catch wild camels. If this worked, it would be a world first and a major breakthrough in our quest to be the best.
It was hard to tear myself away from the family again, but I imagined it was only going to be for four or so weeks. Once again, that was not the way it turned out.
Six
The unexpected
Heath was a man for big ideas, but I was the vet with the expertise in camels. The responsibility was squarely on my shoulders. And Heath had raised an almighty expectation.
But I was determined to make this work so right at the start I brought on board an old university mate of mine, Dr Angus McKinnon, who had done pioneering embryo transfer work with cattle and horses. But would the same principle apply with camels? The plan was that we would conduct our experiment from go to whoa in Australia and, should it work, we would then replicate it in Al Ain.
I met up in with Angus in Perth and we flew first to Port Hedland on the north-western coast of Western Australia, and then another couple of hundred kilometres inland to Marble Bar.
First we needed to round up wild camels and we did it on an industrial scale: three hundred in all. To do this we required light planes to go camel spotting, and helicopters and groups of vehicles to herd them into fenced-off holding pens.
Embryo transfer is a delicate scientific procedure that needs to be done in laboratory conditions, using very advanced equipment. It involves injecting a female with hormonal drugs to stimulate the production of eggs then, using ultrasound, monitoring the effects to see how many egg-carrying follicles are produced and to determine the best time for mating.
Once the eggs are fertilised the embryos are flushed from the female, isolated and cleaned before being implanted in other females as surrogates. This means you need to have other female camels ready and primed to accept an embryo. In other words, they need to be hormonally synchronised using drugs, with their bodies tricked into thinking they are pregnant. Timing is everything if the implanted embryo is to turn into a pregnancy.
As far as breeding faster camels goes, using embryos from your best female racing camel with your best male is much more likely to result in the right genes. Then the lower quality females carry the embryos and give birth, which frees up your high-quality female to continue racing—and puts your lower quality females to good use giving birth to future champions.
That was the theory, anyway, but we were working with a hundred unknowns because of the limited knowledge of camel reproductive cycles. All we knew was that they were not like humans or cattle or horses, where the female releases an egg at regular times in a cycle.
Angus tried out different hormone regimes to discover what worked with the camel. We injected them with moderate doses and then overdoses to establish boundaries. We explored the reproductive anatomy of the camel to determine how we needed to adapt established embryo transfer techniques. The anatomy of a camel’s cervix, for example, is different to the horse or the cow.
We discovered that the best way to collect semen was to anaesthetise the male and use electro-ejaculation to stimulate the production of sperm, because camels aren’t necessarily co-operative when it comes to mating.
Within a month we knew we were onto something major. The fertility drugs had produced thirty to forty eggs per camel which were ready to be fertilised. It was a huge number and something we could never have expected; a cow might produce fifteen to twenty eggs and a horse only three or four at the very best. The results were beyond our wildest hopes, and we were the first in the world to do it. I reported back to Heath and I could hear the relief in his voice from ten thousand kilometres away.
This was our Eureka moment. We knew right then that we were in business.
Unfortunately, though, this standout success is not what I remember most about this trip to Australia.
Two weeks into our embryo work at Marble Bar I took a call late at night from Heath, on the line from Al Ain. I knew instantly that something was very wrong.
There was no easy way to break the news. ‘Alex,’ Heath said, ‘Natalia has been found dead.’ Our baby had stopped breathing and no-one knew exactly why.
Natalia was just nine months old.
I couldn’t quite comprehend what Heath was telling me. For a moment I thought he might be having a lend of me. I was numb with disbelief. How was this possible, again? When I had left her in Al Ain a fortnight before there was nothing wrong with her. For all I knew she was a million dollars.
Heath told me that Natalia was sleeping in her cot when Patti went out to do some shopping. About half an hour later our housemaid had discovered her, apparently lifeless, and had raced into the office next door to get Heath. But nothing could be done. She died on the way to hospital.
Having left the family behind in Australia and then leaving them for a second time, I had spent only a few months with her. Now she was dead. The idea that we could have lost our second baby was so outside the bounds of reality that I just didn’t get it. I was numb.
We packed up the lab and I travelled back down to Perth with Angus to make arrangements for Natalia’s funeral. Forty-eight hours later Patti and the girls arrived at Perth airport with a tiny coffin bearing our baby. Heath and his wife, Chrissie, came along from Al Ain with them. We were still none the wiser about what exactly had happened; it ended up being called sudden infant death syndrome. Like Anya three years before, it was another unexplained event. I just wanted more information.
Natalia’s funeral passed in a blur. It felt unreal to be sitting with Patti and the girls, looking on at this tiny coffin and knowing our baby girl was inside. There was nothing quite like seeing that tiny coffin coming down the aisle, let alone for the second time. It started. Then it was over. I felt disconnected from everything unfolding around me, as though I wasn’t even there and this was happening to someone else. I was immune from any feeling, so much so that I didn’t even cry. What kind of father doesn’t cry at his own baby’s funeral? I still have a lot of trouble with the fact that I didn’t shed even one tear. That is something that has stayed with me all these years later.
Everything about Natalia’s funeral was surreal. None of us had any attachment to Perth: no family, no past, no memories. We held the funeral there for no other reason than it was the closest city to where I was working. Where was home, anyway? Not Tweed Heads anymore. And certainly not Sydney or Melbourne, which I had left years ago. If home is the place where you are most comfortable then home was wherever the camels were.
As a family we couldn’t be apart right now, so Patti and I decided all four of us would stick together. I had unfinished business with the embryo transfer project, and to be honest there was no better place to be than on Corunna Downs Station, near Marble Bar: out in the middle of the desert with the camels and nobody else, maybe we could try to get our heads around what had happened.
We really isolated ourselves for the first two or so weeks. I didn’t want people milling around with their sympathy, as well meaning as it was. We were with close friends like Angus as well as some Emiratis who had flown out for the project. I found it better to keep working with the camels than to stop, think and maybe fall to pieces. So, yes, I distracted myself from the whole thing.
I have grown to like deserts because they are so completely isolated and isolating. You can get yourself into a place that allows you to feel insignificant in this huge expanse. Wherever you look, there is nothing and nobody.
There is also something comforting about being in a desert with camels. Humans aren’t meant to be in the desert but, as long as you have a camel, you
are safe. So being with camels in these incredible expanses gives a real sense of belonging, especially in the Australian desert, with only deafening silence and the vast emptiness of the Milky Way above you. At no point can you feel less significant.
What are the odds of losing not just one but two babies? And for this to happen not in war or famine but in the safety of home, sleeping in their cot? The odds seemed greater than the number of stars in the sky, twinkling down at you in the dead, black silence of a desert night. I occasionally allowed the reality of what had happened to creep in. We had lost Anya, done the camel race across Australia when I survived for weeks on end buzzing on adrenalin and three hours’ sleep a night. We had another baby, moved to the Middle East. Then we lost Natalia. For three years we’d spun from one life-changing event to another.
Bit by bit, Patti and I were gathering ourselves together to do what we had done with Anya: to put a brave face on it all and carry on. Soon enough, if a stranger were to look at either of us, they would never have guessed what we’d been through.
I often look back at Lindy Chamberlain and the death of her baby, Azaria, in the desert. People were so quick to judge her because she looked ‘hard’. In other words, she wasn’t a weeping, emotional mess. But I think Patti and I were a bit like that to the outside world. I could understand Lindy Chamberlain’s ‘cold’ reaction, which meant she was attacked for apparently being an unfeeling bitch. Why should she be criticised? Does anyone really know how they would react until it happened to them? Thankfully, very few people will ever know what it is like to lose a baby, but that doesn’t stop them making judgements. We’re all meant to die before our children.
As part of coming to terms with our tragedy, we carried Natalia’s ashes with us to Patti’s parents’ farm at Healesville, outside Melbourne. It was a place that held a special significance for us. There, on the top of a hill, was a beautiful, peaceful spot that we knew only too well. Patti’s father’s ashes already lay there under a large, spreading tree. It was also where we had spread Anya’s ashes. Now Natalia would join her. Many years later I returned to fix a brass plaque to the tree, with a poem in memory of our babies.