by Alex Tinson
As a sign of respect for her standing in their society, Khaled’s mother, Fatima, was known as Sheikha Fatima—‘Sheikha’ is the term for the wife of the leader of a tribe. Fatima was from the generation of Emirati women who would only ever appear in public fully covered, including a veil over her face with a narrow slit where her eyes were visible. So it would have been easy to assume she could be a little hostile.
As it turned out, there was nothing forbidding or fearsome at all about Fatima. She welcomed Patti into her family home. Khaled’s mother, it turned out, had held the same suspicions and fears as us. The two women compared notes and agreed that, yes, Katya and Khaled were too young and they needed to be kept apart. Thankfully, she held no animosity towards us whatsoever, even though our daughter might have been judged to have turned her son away from the right path for an Emirati boy.
We decided that the solution was to send Katya to boarding school back in Melbourne. We had family there who could look after her. And besides, we needed to make sure Katya had the best possible education for her last two years of school.
Before sending her back to Australia I invited Khaled to meet for coffee at the Hilton Hotel, scene of many a delicate negotiation. I told him he and Katya were too young and that they needed to concentrate on their studies. And I pointed out that Fatima was of the same mind. Khaled looked at me and agreed.
I spoke to Katya separately and gave her the same message. She also looked at me and agreed. Reluctantly. She was none too happy about it.
But I’m sure they both knew this wasn’t the end of the story. Not by a long way. There was an ember burning and it might not be easy to snuff this one out.
Me, Scott, Wendy and our dog Gina.
From the surf to the desert. I’m far right and my brother Scott is in the middle.
Mum, me, Patti, Dad and Patti’s mum Gwen Crabtree on our wedding day in 1977.
Patti with a tiger cub at Bacchus Marsh Lion Park.
With a young lion and a young tiger at Bacchus Marsh.
Grandpa Tinson with Katya
Katya and Erica holding the hand of a tranquillised chimp, Tweed Heads.
With Anya.
Patti, Katya and me ‘enjoying’ the Great Camel Race.
Flooded in the desert at Boulia during the Great Camel Race.
Erica (aged 6) and Katya (aged 10) in harness during the Great Camel Race.
In the early days: (from left to right) Doug, Bengawi, me and Geoff.
Heath, Bengawi and me checking our first six births.
The team at Hilli in the early days: (from left to right) Soulieman, Hussain, me, Laddat, Dr Rajesh, Buchs, Mahboob and Abdulla. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
Herding wild Western Australian camels for early tests.
A camel catching trip, lnnamincka, South Australia.
Katya, Erica and Obaid Al Dhaheri, Aylan and Obaid Hilli on an embryo research and camel trip to Australia in 1989, just after Natalia died.
Dad and my girls.
Harry the Camel.
Working on Harry the Camel. (Courtersy, Silvia Baron)
Proud parents of the world’s first embryo transfer baby. With Aylan (left) and Angus (right).
Flushing for embryos, with Dr Rajesh and Hussain. (Courtesy Silvia Baron)
Doug at the treadmill doing research with an oxygen mask.
Doing bladder surgery with Angus.
Our first Gold Cup.
Being a vet, desert style.
Camel racing in front of the emerging Burj Khalifa, Dubai.
A camel race starts in Dubai.
One of the young boys who came to our rescue in Mongolia. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
Poonsack’s ger was my lab and a milk can my stool. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
Erica and I with the two white Bactarians given to us as a gift. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
The Hilli research centre. (Courtesy, David Mitchell)
With Mabrokan, the biggest camel I have ever seen. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
Erica doing surgery for the Al Ain mobile clinic. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
The family: (from left to right) Katya, Khaled, Madeline, me and Erica. (Courtesy, Silvia Baron)
Mama Dana with Hazza.
Rashid’s majlis, with H.H. Sheikh Sultan, flanked by Rashid (right) and Hazza (left) listening to a poetry recital after a Gold Cup win.
With Hazza. His first practice toy rifle is at his side.
The full line up of the Royal family with H.H. Sheikh Sultan presenting the President H.H. Sheikh Khalifa with Theeba’s Gold Sword.
The best team: Theeba, Rashid, me and Hazza.
Katya and Khaled at home with Hazza and Mahra. The portrait behind them is that of Khaled’s grandfather, Emir.
With my Emirati grandchildren: Mahra, Zayed and Hazza.
This is my Bedouin life. With Hazza and Khaled.
Twelve
Camel vet to desert vet
As the vet in charge of a reproductive program, I would spend half my waking hours with my right arm shoved up the rear of a camel. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s what goes with the territory when you’re breeding the world’s fastest racing camels.
Everything happens at the rear of a camel. You reach deep inside the rectum with a small ultrasonic probe to get the best view of how many eggs a female is producing. When it comes to getting the embryos out, a large bagful of fluid is squeezed in through the rear to flush the embryos out into a collection tube. From there it’s off to a microscope to examine the quality of the embryos, but then it’s back to the rear again to implant an embryo into the uterus of a surrogate.
This is a cycle I came to repeat thousands of times. The Hilli Embryo Transfer Centre for Racing Camels was beautifully set up to make it all happen with a minimum of fuss or wasted time. We refined every step in the process to make it incredibly efficient.
Traditionally, to treat a camel it needs to fold its legs and sit on the ground, but we devised a method of treating a camel standing up. We used a cattle crush chute to contain them, with bars under the belly of the camel and, to keep it still, bars across its chest and rear. This allowed us to push each camel through in about a minute, compared with the twenty or so minutes it takes to treat a camel sitting down. With three crushes erected side by side, I could move from one to the other while more camels were led in to take their place.
Over the years, Hilli turned out thousands of embryos and hundreds of successful births. It was all ticking over like a machine. Examine, ultrasound, flush, implant. Examine, ultrasound, flush, implant.
It might sound like a factory, but this did not take away the delight I felt every time a baby camel came into the world. I got a special thrill knowing that I had flushed it as an eight-day embryo from its mother, and washed and handled it as a microscopic being. The many stages were recorded and dated by hand and kept in large ring-bound folders on my bookcase. I know it’s not the traditional baby book, but there were massive amounts of devotion and care poured into each birth.
With my credentials as the camel vet well established, I found my services being called on to tend to the sheikhs’ other creatures. The call always came out of the blue and it always sent my day sideways. But if it took me away from the rear of a camel for a while, I wasn’t complaining.
This, of course, was not strictly in my brief. I was hired to be the camel vet but, as I was becoming aware, an employment contract was not much more than a rough guide. Being employed by sheikhs can mean you are pretty much on call for anything. In fact, you never quite knew what would come next.
Apart from that, a regional town like Al Ain meant a close-knit community where things were done on a very personal level. If you were the best qualified then of course you should help out, even if you’re not strictly an expert.
Thus I found I was morphing, gradually, from the camel vet to the desert vet.
My new boss, Sheikh Sultan, was very hands-on with the camels, but he also had a vast private zo
o at his farm. This was where he went to relax, and it was something of a fantasy land. Apart from the animals, the farm was also home to his private collection of two dozen of the world’s rarest and most valuable cars, all limited-edition, exclusive marques such as the Bugatti Veyron, the fastest street-legal production car in the world. There was a set of Ferraris—from the antique to the latest concept cars—and the gull-winged Mercedes, produced in 1959 and acquired from the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The collection was kept in a large display area inside a complex that included a swimming pool, a bowling lane and an elevated private office, from which the sheikh could survey his collection.
The sheikh’s farm was hidden from public view by a high concrete and brick fence which ran, it seemed, for kilometres. Driving in was like entering a whole new landscape, the desert transformed into something more like a forest, with date palms, hundreds of trees and lots of vegetation. To achieve this in the desert is quite an engineering feat, involving laying massive pipes to bring water to the property and then an intricate watering system.
The sheikh had a section for the camels and a separate area for the horses, plus a small enclosure for goats and sheep, which were likely to provide a feast for any visitor. He also kept a huge herd of around two thousand Arabian gazelles plus a small number of cheetahs over the years. But the centrepiece—and what made the sheikh’s farm special—was a closed-off area of around ten hectares set aside for his collection of Arabian oryx.
Next to the camel, the oryx is my favourite desert animal. It has the bearing of the antelope you find in Africa, but it is much slimmer. Its horns are very straight so, when you look at it side-on, it appears to have a long single horn coming out of its head, which is why the oryx is said to have inspired the legend of the unicorn. The people of the desert might have relied on the camel for survival, but they considered the oryx to be a more beautiful, majestic animal. Some scientists also believe the oryx is even better adapted to the desert than the camel, which is a big claim, though they are certainly capable of surviving without water for very long periods. They are striking beasts in every way, which is no doubt why the animal has been adopted as a symbol throughout the Arabian Peninsula; it is the national animal of Oman and the symbol for Qatar Airways.
If you go to a zoo, you might see one or two oryx. The sheikh had about fifty of them roaming free. It was exhilarating to see them in such numbers.
Even if it was something relatively minor, like stitching a cut or taking blood, there was no such thing as an easy job when dealing with these animals. The oryx’s horns are long and sharp, and they use them to impale their prey. That makes working with them really dangerous.
First I needed to corral the oryx into a holding pen in the centre of the farm. The idea was to run them into a funnel that led them down into a confined area. Once the oryx was trapped, three or four farm workers would lean over the wooden barrier and grab onto its horns, to prevent it from swinging its head around to gore me.
Everything needed to be done rapid-fire. A restrained wild animal is stressed, and the workers are holding on for dear life. There’s adrenalin everywhere. So I had to move fast.
First step was to jab in a syringe to take blood, but there was no time to wait around for the result. So I had to take a punt on what the problem was and maybe try a long-acting shot of antibiotic, something to last four or five days. Or perhaps an antipyretic to reduce a fever, hoping that whatever they have isn’t too serious. Once results of the blood tests are in I could follow up with an oral treatment, assuming the animal gets back on their food or is at least drinking water.
Ideally the whole operation is over in just a couple of minutes, which is more than long enough for those workers hanging onto those killer horns. But you need to make it count because nobody wants to be in the position of trying to catch the animal a second time. The first time, okay, you might catch it by surprise. After that they get to know the routine. They’re not so stupid that they’ll fall for the old funnel trick again, plus if you chase an oryx for more than five minutes and put them under stress, they are vulnerable to a syndrome called capture myopathy, which means they have so much adrenalin coursing through them—due to the fight or flight mechanism—that their muscles break down and they drop dead. It’s a common reaction in wild animals. Predators in the wild normally move in for the kill very quickly and it’s usually all over in two minutes, so their prey are simply not physiologically equipped for long chases.
This means you have to be very methodical when you capture an animal like an oryx. Chasing them around and around until they get exhausted isn’t an option and is especially bad when they’re being chased in confinement. The animals also get more resistant to the knockout drugs you are using and you end up needing bigger and bigger doses to get the same effect.
It’s always such a drama.
The sheikhs have a special affinity not only with camels but with wildlife in general. They love owning exotic animals and just about every sheikh has his own private zoo. Unlike most of us, they have the wealth to assemble their collections from all over the world. Going to these zoos means you enter the private world of the sheikhs, a world foreigners rarely get to glimpse. Some sheikhs have a particular fascination for the big cats of Africa: the lions, tigers and cheetahs. Others have everything.
One of my common call-outs was to the Crown Prince’s son, whose palace was just down the road from my house in Al Ain. He had a huge wildlife collection, including animals native to the Arabian Gulf such as the oryx, the ibex and the gazelle, as well as others like wolves, tigers and lions. You name it, he had it. Typically I would go there to advise on feeding and how to control parasites.
My ultimate boss, Sheikh Khalifa, had created a landscape of rolling green hills by growing grass on ten hectares of sand dunes inside his Al Ain palace to create lush fields where the sheikh’s collection of oryx could run and graze freely. The Crown Prince had also created a research area inside his palace for breeding endangered species of the Arabian Peninsula, with separate pens for the straight-horned Arabian oryx and its cousin the scimitar oryx, with its long, curved horns, as well as the Arabian tahr, one of his favourites.
Most of my jobs were straightforward distress calls for various misadventures. For example, a leopard might have become caught in a fence and needed to be pacified to release it. The wolves were particularly problematic: put two of them together and, sure as eggs, they’ll take a piece out of each other and you need to stitch them up. I always kept a full veterinary medical kit in the back of my four-wheel drive, along with a fridge containing antibiotics and other medicines. When I had to attend to an injured wolf I always threw in an extra supply of sutures and needles.
Courtesy of my time as a graduate vet at the Lion Safari Park in Bacchus Marsh, I already had experience with the big cats. But the first time I dealt with a wolf was at Sheikh Sultan’s farm.
I arrived to find a timber wolf pacing up and down in a small open enclosure. It had picked up some serious gashes to its legs after a fight with another wolf and by now was quite agitated. It wasn’t life-threatening, but every case has its own demands. I was surprised by the size of the timber wolf. It’s a big rangy animal, but also very thin.
With a timber wolf as much as an oryx, you need to sum up the situation quickly and then move. A timber wolf is like a dog, but if anything it is smarter and more attuned to survival. An animal can smell fear, but it can also pick up on indecision. So, as a vet, it is essential to be authoritative around an animal.
The sheikh’s animal handlers had managed to separate the wolves, but beyond that they had no idea of what to do. You might be able to approach an injured dog, but a wild wolf was another matter. First I needed to get the injured animal into a smaller fenced-off area. Once it was there, I jabbed a needle through the wire to knock it out. When it was tranquillised we dragged the animal out onto open ground, clipped off the fur around the injured areas, cleaned the wounds and got to work with
the stitching. Then I injected a long-acting antibiotic.
I was always happy to work on cheetahs. I have seen a few of them over the years, for everything from a simple vaccination to fixing a broken leg. Cheetahs are classified as cats, but in reality they are much more doglike. Unlike all the other big cats, the cheetah’s claws are semi-retractable, one of the anatomical adaptations that has made the cheetah the fastest land animal in the world. But though it is a prolific hunter in the wild, it is relatively easy to domesticate, which is why they are a pet of choice for sheikhs in the UAE. Indeed there were plenty of stories of young sheikhs turning up to a café or some such with a cheetah on a lead, a little like a fashion accessory. There’s no way I would trust any other big cat. It would rip your head off.
A good Emirati friend of mine named Salim called me for a favour one day. One of his three pet cheetahs was limping badly so would I come out to take a look? I arrived to find this beautiful cat in real pain and barely able to lift its paw. Salim held on to it as I ran my hand around its lower leg. I could feel that one of the two main bones in its leg, the ulna, was fractured. The radius bone was intact.
The animal was so tame Salim was able to hold it against his legs while I administered the tranquilliser. From there it was a matter of applying a plaster cast to immobilise the leg for several weeks.