by Alex Tinson
Rolley, the Staffordshire bull terrier, was just the start. Staffies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for us they were a family favourite. Patti had grown up with bulldogs, which have a similar temperament. Staffies are strong, determined little dogs, all muscle and grunt. Yes, they are part of the pit bull terrier breed and they can be pugnacious. But they are only dangerous if you don’t treat them well. Otherwise they are intelligent, incredibly loyal dogs.
After Rolley we introduced a cute little Siamese kitten who we christened Baldrick. He and Rolley used to play together and generally hang out. Invariably, when we came home, they’d be curled up together on the front doorstep.
Our house adjoined the camel centre office complex and its holding pens, so we also had 150 or so camels in our backyard at any one time. Before long we introduced two magnificent purebred Arabian stallions into the mix, courtesy of a British friend of ours who was working for the royal stables. Mr Zuhair came to the party and organised for a couple of stables to be built next to the camels. The horses needed a lot of work, which was great because it meant the girls had to be disciplined with the brushing, feeding and exercise. This was important. Like most expat families in the Gulf, we had live-in home help, so there was a real risk that our kids would grow up with everything being done for them. Katya and Erica worked with the horses to turn them into showjumpers—not what they are bred for, but the girls stuck at it nevertheless.
Between the dog, the cat, the camels and the horses, we had the makings of the sort of home the girls had been used to in Australia. All we needed now were the wild things.
Living on the edge of the desert meant that the wildlife of the sands would often come to us. One surprise we found at the rear of our small garden was Arab desert hedgehogs, the smallest of the hedgehog family. Rolley was particularly attracted to these little beasts, but they had a great protective mechanism—they would immediately wrap themselves into a spikey little ball and become impossible to catch. Though of course that didn’t stop Rolley from trying again and again.
We would also find the odd gerbil, a tiny little thing also known as the desert rat, hopping into our patch. This too provided something for Rolley and Baldrick to get excited about.
But our most interesting house guest, hands down—and the only one that ever fazed the girls—was Boris the camel spider. The camel spider is a massive creature, around twenty to twenty-five centimetres across; you get an idea of the size if you spread your fingers out and then put your hands side by side. Not only does it have a large body, it is also quite hairy, which is why it is known as the sheep of the desert. It was one of the weirdest beasts I’d seen and I was completely fascinated by them.
Actually we had quite a few camel spiders, but Boris was the standout: the biggest, meanest camel spider you’ve ever seen. It wasn’t poisonous, but it was terrifying nonetheless. In the early days, before we knew much about the camel spider, driving out from our house we’d literally see Boris’s shadow run across the driveway. That’s how big and mean they are. Instead of two fangs they have four, which makes their bite more like a car crusher.
When I first found Boris in the garden, I cornered him and put him into a two litre ice-cream container, then plonked him into a disused aquarium. We’d toss him snacks to devour; Boris would demolish a fifteen-centimetre scorpion in about three seconds. He ate mice. Boris even ate other camel spiders. Anything you threw in, Boris would crunch, munch and swallow. The locals couldn’t understand why we would keep Boris and his ilk in our house. Bedouin lore has it that these spiders sneak up on camels, anaesthetise them and then eat pieces out of them. They were scared witless by them.
When you don’t know the desert, it’s almost impossible to imagine that it could contain any life at all. It is a very different environment to the forest I grew up with as my backyard, with its treasure-trove of snakes and reptiles. But the desert, too, holds hidden treasures, if you know where and how to look. There is an elegant simplicity about the desert: a vast tableau of endless golden sand set against a big, brilliant blue sky. It’s easy to believe you are the only living thing there. But if you get out of your four-wheel drive and walk slowly, you’ll find the tell-tale signs of life. I learned from my forays into the desert that it is in fact best to head off on a camel. With their slow, rhythmic movement you soon become at one with the pace of desert life and start to see more clearly the wildlife that inhabits it.
Look carefully and you will see how the sand tells its own story. Here a snake has slithered across the grains of sand, leaving a smooth, flat trail in its wake. Or there the small, choppy imprint of a lizard’s clawed feet, which have skittered across the sands. It’s about training your eye and heightening awareness for a different form of wildlife. By concentrating your gaze really hard, you might just spot the eyeballs of the saw-scaled viper, a snake that buries itself by pushing its body up and out against the sand. This creates a trough in which it can sink below the surface, like a submerging submarine. All that will be left are the eyes, which are set high on top of its head.
The wildlife of the desert has adapted to its environment in much the same way that snakes and lizards have adapted to the Australian bush. Rather than tones of grey and brown, the desert animals have beige, creamy colourings, which make them hard to spot against the sand. And of course a lot of them only come out at night to escape the heat of the day. Most of the time you’ll simply miss a desert snake or a lizard; it will feel your presence and quickly wriggle away under the sand as you approach. Their territory is different and they have adapted to quickly drill down into little holes in the sand. Desert snakes and lizards are generally much smaller than their Australian cousins for the simple reason that there is not as much wildlife to feast on. And unlike Australia, you are unlikely to find a deadly snake in the desert.
The most unpleasant desert reptile I have come across is an evil-looking character called the dabb lizard. This is a stocky lizard, like a cross between a bearded dragon and a stump-tailed lizard. The dabb is a truly ugly little beast and it has a ferocious bite; if it latches onto something it just doesn’t let go, so you have to be extremely careful with it. Despite my willingness as a boy to keep all manner of poisonous snakes in my home, when it came to the dabb I thought better of it. It is popular in the Arabian Gulf as a delicacy and Emirati boys enjoyed hunting the dabb, so much so that it threatened to become extinct.
One of my favourite reptiles was a remarkable little lizard called the blue agama, which puffs itself up and changes colour from red to an iridescent blue when it senses danger. This bright colouring is common for animals from Africa, which is indeed the usual home of the blue agama. They are sociable creatures and they like to hang out in groups, so we acquired enough of them to keep each other company.
Some of my favourite new pets were hand-me-downs. Now and then I would get a call from Mr Zuhair or other locals I knew, wondering if I might please find a pet snake or a lizard for the children of a sheikh. I would head up to a shop in Dubai and buy something harmless like a corn snake; they are good as kids’ pets because they aren’t huge, have a docile nature and hardly ever bite. They are also very easy to look after.
I also got the occasional request for something more on the wild side, like a boa constrictor. They are impressive snakes but the boa can have a painful bite, especially if it’s a large one, though it is rarely dangerous to humans. The thing about the boa constrictor is that it will strike when it feels there is a threat, so invariably it wouldn’t be long before I got another call to say the snake had bitten little so and so—please come and get rid of it.
I was more than happy to oblige as the unofficial snake procurer because, as a kid, having snakes had sparked my lifelong interest in animals of the wild. I think every kid should have that chance.
A friend of ours living nearby had acquired a macaw from the local market. I don’t mind admitting I was jealous. They are beautiful birds and for a while I toyed with getting one for our home.
They are real characters but they are also very difficult to handle, more like a monkey than a standard bird. They have a big beak and my mate’s macaw put it to use by chewing the piano, the upholstery and the electrical wiring. Another reason not to take on a macaw is that they live a very long time, up to seventy or eighty years, so they will more than likely outlive you, which means you have to make provision for them in your will. Apart from all that, as a rule I am opposed to keeping birds in captivity because they suffer by being confined. Snakes and lizards, on the other hand, are not intelligent enough to know they are in a small space. Normally they will curl up in a corner and believe this is their world. And snakes, particularly, are easy to care for. They only need to eat every two weeks or so.
Bit by bit, snakes and lizards took their places inside our home. It was far too hot to keep them outdoors, so I placed them in various aquariums around the house. So it looked at last like Katya, Erica and Madeline would be growing up with their own private menagerie of exotic beasts. Erica even made her own contribution when, as a ten-year-old, she accompanied me out to a camel camp and went off poking around by herself. After a while she turned up with a sandfish lizard in her hands, looking for all the world like a seasoned reptile hunter.
We now had animals aplenty for the kids, and most days they were outside messing around with the horses and the camels. I decided that, as a finishing touch, I needed to have a sign made up for the entrance to our driveway to warn drivers to slow down, so I went back down to the Crown Prince’s workshop to see Yafour with his bits of metal and welding machine. He had worked miracles knocking together the machinery we needed to train the camels, but now I had a simple request: I wanted a sign, please, in English and in Arabic.
I carried it home, drilled some holes on the gate at the entrance to the driveway and fixed it on tight. Yafour had done a beautiful job, using white lettering on a red-for-danger background: ‘WARNING! Reduce speed. Children and camels around’, it announced.
This, finally, was home, sweet home.
Nine
Dicing with danger
As an Australian vet in a town of expats, it wasn’t long before word spread that I was Mr Fixit for anyone in a jam. And so it was that I got a call to help some Australians who were in a real mess with a couple of monkeys.
We all love monkeys, but from a vet’s point of view they are a nightmare. Everyone is fascinated with them because they are versions of ourselves and can copy what humans do. Scratch your head and a monkey will scratch its. And then they’ll do something crazy like suddenly leap and swing from limb to limb. People can’t resist them. They’ll even dress them up like little humans if they can.
Monkeys are smart. They’ve got opposing thumbs and fingers and that means they can do stuff. The little bastards are strong, too, and that’s the problem. With their incredible grip they can open anything, pull anything and break anything more efficiently than humans can. From the point of view of a vet it actually makes them way more dangerous to deal with than lions or tigers.
If you wanted to indulge your fantasy of owning a monkey in the UAE it was easy: all you had to do was drop down to the local market, hand over your money and you could take one home. And that’s exactly what had happened. Friends of friends had acquired a couple of cute little fellows from the market near Al Ain. Unfortunately, of course, the monkey doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and now they were at their wits’ end.
I arrived to find the couple had rented two apartments: one for them to live in, the other for the monkeys. They warned me that things had got somewhat out of control, and on opening the door I could see what they meant. I had some trepidation about this call, but the apartment was worse than I could have imagined. It was mayhem, like something out of the Gaza Strip. The monkeys had destroyed everything, and I mean everything. Fixtures had been pulled off the walls. Light fittings were twisted and smashed; it was amazing they hadn’t munched through the wires and electrocuted themselves. Food was spread all over the place. They’d been shitting on the floor. It was just a disaster.
I could see pretty clearly what had happened. Monkeys are naturally inquisitive and like to investigate things, so if there’s nothing for them to do they get bored. The couple told me they spent a fair bit of time with them but it’s like a spoiled kid: you tell a kid it’s time to go to bed but they keep wanting to watch television and make a fuss. Monkeys are the same. They want attention and, once they’re bored, they start looking for stuff to do.
It was clear that there was a bit of a ‘mum, dad and the kids’ thing going on. The owners really had tried to anthropomorphise them, originally keeping the monkeys in a cage but then deciding that wasn’t fair: the poor things should have more space. That worked fine for a while until the male got upset if they put too much pressure on him and tried to stop him doing what he wanted to do.
They weren’t aggressive as such, but the couple wondered if I could give the monkeys some medication to be better behaved. Like Prozac, did they mean?
The problem was that, as cute as they are, you can never trust these things. As a student vet I’d witnessed a terrible incident at Melbourne zoo involving a gibbon called Charlie. Charlie was the darling of the crowds, a really cute little fellow. One day a keeper with very long hair got a bit too close to Charlie’s cage and, quick as a flash, cute little Charlie grabbed the keeper’s hair on both sides of his head and smashed his face against the bars right in front of me. The guy was knocked out cold in about a quarter of a second, on the ground and bleeding. The gibbon really beat the shit out of him. And Charlie thought that was pretty clever.
My advice to the couple was to just get rid of the monkeys. They were not going to win here. In the end, I think they surrendered them to a zoo.
And I doubt they got their bond back on the apartment.
The monkey episode was just a page in my growing portfolio of extracurricular activities. Some I did simply because I was the go-to guy for other western expats who I’d meet at a function, and later find myself on speed dial when things went wrong with their animal.
Some of my other activities, though, were very much linked to my new alter ego as Harry the Camel. It was all part of keeping myself so busy that I wouldn’t have time to dwell on the loss of Natalia. In truth, the only problems I have ever had in the UAE have come from dealing with expats rather than the locals. And I was about to get my first dose of that.
Word had spread around the camel community back in Australia of the work we were doing in Al Ain. A couple of Australian hopefuls heard of the lucrative prize money on offer and thought they might as well have a crack at it, too. Bringing over a bunch of camels they had trained using treadmills in Australia, they put out the challenge that they were here to take on the best the UAE had to offer.
This was big news in Dubai, where Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum ran the largest and most successful camel operation in the world. In boxing terms, he was the undisputed world champion.
It came at a time when Dubai was redefining the whole idea of an Arab city, starting on the road to becoming a major business and tourist hub with some of the world’s most outlandish attractions, like an indoor ski-field, where you could think you were in the Swiss Alps rather than a desert city with fifty-degree heat raging outside. Dubai was turning into the glitter capital of the Gulf.
The challenge was out and arrangements were made for the Australian camels to compete against Dubai’s finest. Heath and I were curious to have a look at these blow-ins. We took ourselves off to the camp they’d set up in Dubai and coincidentally arrived at about the same time as Sheikh Mohammed, who had dropped in to check the quality of the title contenders. Being next in line as the Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed was of course surrounded by tight security.
None of this bothered Heath, who has what you might call a healthy disdain for protocol. In fact, Heath didn’t give a damn what your title was. He treated everyone exactly the same. Cutting through all the palaver, H
eath started a discussion with Sheikh Mohammed, who, of course, was very interested to hear that we were from Abu Dhabi. Word had leaked out in the Gulf camel world that we were doing something with embryo transfer, though the details were not well known. Sheikh Mohammed took up the theme and told us that Dubai would be the first to produce an embryo transfer calf. Most westerners in this situation would nod and politely agree, but not Heath. He was the opposite of the fawning, on-the-make westerner you so often find in the UAE; I loved him for it, and I suspect the royal families he dealt with might have felt the same. Heath laughed and told Sheikh Mohammed there was no way Dubai would be first: that would be us. Sheikh Mohammed smiled and wished us the best, no doubt certain Dubai would win out.
The great showdown was to be held the following day. Dubai’s leading camel track was closed to the public and the Dubai royal family came out to watch. In the event, the Australian camels got absolutely hammered. The challenge was a grand flop and the swaggering Aussies were left to limp off into the sunset.
Suddenly, though, the Australians behind the scheme had two problems. They had spent a small fortune on their flight of fancy and now they had a dozen camels which they couldn’t take back to Australia and that no-one in the UAE wanted. To top it off, a couple of Sheikh Mohammed’s camels became sick and rumour spread that the Australian camels were the source, even though that was pretty well impossible given that Australian camels are disease-free.
The Aussie boys were in a fix so I rang them with an offer to take all twelve camels off their hands and keep them in a mate’s camp. But now I had a problem: these things were expensive to feed and maintain, so I had to find a way to make money out of them. I had an idea: my old friend Paddy McHugh had turned a handy dollar offering camel rides into the outback, so why not try that here? Camel rides were big business in the tourist spots of Egypt and Jordan, but our research showed that, believe it or not, there were no camel ride businesses in the UAE. Indeed, there wasn’t a single one in the entire Arabian Gulf.