The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  This close relationship with animals is something I love about life in the UAE. It resonates with me, not only as a vet but as a human being. There are simply fewer barriers between humans and animals. In western countries like Australia, people are alienated from animals. There are rules for this and rules for that. Yes, you have to be sure that animal welfare is being looked after and that animals aren’t endangered, but in Australia these days a kid can’t even have a snake without a licence. Life is a lot poorer for that.

  Thirteen

  Leading by a nose

  Sheikh Sultan was on the mobile and he was excited. Make that beside himself with happiness. ‘Congratulations, congratulations!’ The words were tumbling out. ‘It was unbelievable. She ran like a horse!’

  One of our camels, a female called Masah, had won a race where it counted: at a major event in Abu Dhabi for camels owned by UAE sheikhs. What made it so sweet was that Masah was one of our embryo camels.

  I had no idea that one of our lab babies was even racing that day; this was something the sheikh kept to himself. He was well aware of the secretiveness that still surrounded the whole reproductive program and it was his policy to tell no-one, me included, if an embryo camel was racing. Indeed the trainers themselves had no idea if they were working with embryo camels or normal camels. The camels were all allocated by ballot to the trainers, with nothing to identify one from the other. The sheikh didn’t want the Bedouin to know because he didn’t want the embryo babies to be treated more or less preferentially than any other camel. It was entirely possible that the Bedouin trainers might have wanted to make them look bad.

  Masah’s win was our greatest triumph to date. I had been stuck doing something else and felt rotten for missing the moment, but I looked at the footage later and it was true. The race was run over six kilometres and Masah was well back in the pack with just 500 metres to go. Then she just took off and ran over the competition. She was one of our best, but in this race it was as though Masah was powered by a rocket, catching up and overtaking the leaders in no time flat. Masah had indeed ‘run like a horse’. These were the sweetest words I could hear, and really it was the moment I had been working towards.

  It wasn’t yet a win at the very highest level, but Masah had proven that the Crown Prince now had a camel that was at least the equal of any Dubai camel. She went on to win a further seven races in a row.

  Until Masah’s win, the Crown Prince’s camels were still running at their natural gait, which is more akin to a pacer in horse terms. They rarely, if ever, galloped. The difference is that a horse is designed to race, while a camel is not. A camel is knock-kneed, and on its rear legs its knees are at the back rather than the front of the leg. This makes it great at collapsing its legs under itself to sit in the desert, but the arrangement is not so great for running. The camel is like a diesel engine: turn it on and it goes forever. The horse is more like a petrol-powered V8, explosive and fast.

  By nature, too, the camel doesn’t do things at speed when left to its own devices. I love the fact that they are possessed with an incredible arrogance and self-confidence. They are a very relaxed animal and nothing fazes them. So it’s not that they can’t run fast, it’s just that by and large they don’t want to.

  For our purposes it meant there was so much potential to improve the racing speed of the camel. Fortunately camel racing was, and remains, different to thoroughbred horseracing: there is no governing club that lays down the rules. Horseracing is still bound by old rules, which prevent high-tech reproductive manipulations such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, IVF or cloning. That’s one reason there has been very little change in the speed of horse races for decades. Winning times have barely shifted since the 1970s.

  Not so in the world of camel racing. By the time Masah galloped we had already improved the speed of a camel by ten to fifteen per cent in the space of just six years. The competition with Dubai meant there was a camel arms race between the two city-emirates, with vast resources to play with and no limits on what could be done. Camel racing was becoming way more sophisticated than horseracing.

  Of course, there was no manual around on how to increase the speed of a racing camel and improve its stamina. We were literally writing the book as we went. Around the time of Masah’s win we were on the brink of producing another world first: the first camel calf from a frozen embryo, which would allow us to store embryos and use them at a time of our choosing. We kicked off early DNA research, and we set up a department to look at the types of bacteria, viruses and fungi that cause infections and lower performance. The treadmill research was yielding valuable data on the camel’s heart rate and lactic acid levels under stress. All this allowed us to see how different medicines, feed and supplements affected performance. We discovered the importance of getting vitamin levels right, especially vitamins B1 and E.

  At the same time, Dubai was hardly standing still. Sheikh Mohammed, then the Crown Prince, established the Godolphin horse stables, a monolithic racing and breeding operation. He was also creating a worldwide network of the best horse stables in the UK, the USA, Australia and Ireland and had assembled a great management team. In short, he was creating the largest and most expensive stable of fast horses in human history. All of this provided synergies with his extensive camel operation.

  Sheikh Mohammed’s profile meant that anyone in the world with half an idea that might improve the pace of a camel would get in touch with his operation: anything to enter the glittering kingdom that Dubai was becoming.

  Dubai was investing major sums of money in reproduction technologies. It was even playing with different species and had produced the world’s first ‘cama’ by crossing a camel with a llama, which is genetically linked to the camel family. It was working on crossing a two-hump camel with a one-hump camel and had had some success producing a faster breed.

  Dubai was putting a huge focus on research, but I believed we were on the right track. By the time of Masah’s win we had achieved so much, yet still the major prizes eluded us. We were at a critical juncture in the superheated competition with Dubai. Our masters, too, had a sense that this was the case.

  For the first time I was summoned to meet personally with the Crown Prince. Unusually, there would be no entourage. This would not be part of a larger gathering.

  Angus McKinnon and I arrived at Sheikh Khalifa’s private palace in the capital, Abu Dhabi. There we were presented to the Crown Prince and his half-brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the next in line as Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. I knew we had been summoned for good reasons, to talk about the reproduction program. The meeting lasted an hour and a half, which is a large chunk out of Sheikh Khalifa’s diary. The mood was relaxed and jovial, but there was a serious edge. It might be too much to say it was a council of war, but the Crown Prince wanted to know from us if we had all the support and equipment we needed.

  The whole racing game was changing and I had a sense now that we were out there in the front, leading it.

  Through the 1990s the camel racing business leapt to a new level. The sport of sheikhs had become the growth industry of the Gulf.

  In the UAE over a dozen new racetracks were built and old tracks revamped. There were around 35,000 racing camels in the UAE alone. It was attracting bigger and bigger turnouts from the Bedouin and there was live television coverage before, during and after the races. There was also a new breed of camel racing pundits who would opine on the likely outcomes.

  Our Dubai rivals continued to pour massive sums of money into staying ahead, but the measure of our success would be how we performed at the annual racing festival held over three meetings in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. They are spaced a month apart and run from January to March, while the weather is cool to mild. Each of the meetings runs over ten days. There are Gold Cups to be won for each age group and the biggest race of all is the Golden Sword, which is always the last race of the meeting. It is the ultimate prize, won by the best of the best of all the sheik
hs’ camels.

  For the vets and the support teams this is a time of real pressure. With up to forty races a day and 270 races over a ten day period, it is possible for a trainer to have as many as a hundred camels running over a meeting. Then there is a two-week break between meetings before you have to do it all again. It’s the time you prepare for your camels to be in peak form and free of injury.

  Our performances had improved every year, picking up our first Gold Cup in 1996 and building steadily each year after that.

  It was now 2000, twelve years after we had begun, and here we were on Dubai’s home turf. The races were to be held at the Nad Al Sheba track, close to the centre of the city.

  The sight was spectacular, a picture of modern Arabia all in one frame, with the centuries-old beasts of the desert set against the skyscrapers and glitter of a burgeoning Dubai. It told the thousand-year-old story of Arabian transportation, from camels to Maseratis.

  The 2000 Dubai racing festival became a milestone event for our science and training. No less than three of our camels ran as winners, one female and two males. All were products of the embryo transfer program.

  Winning at home was important, but winning away, especially at the home of our rivals, was honey-sweet. If I had to name the breakthrough moment, the point where we moved from near-equals to leaders, this was it.

  All that remained now was to win the Golden Sword.

  Fourteen

  Schemes and dreams

  While Dr Alex Tinson, the camel vet, was succeeding in the job he had been hired to do, all along there was another Alex Tinson, who was living a parallel life of schemes and dreams and huge risks. This was happening under the banner of Harry the Camel, the children’s book character I’d invented after the death of our baby, Natalia.

  My dumb move to steal our camels from the former head of Interpol was symptomatic of the rollercoaster I was on, once away from the careful science of my day job breeding faster camels.

  Harry the Camel had started as therapy. But this easy going, generous fellow, who liked nothing more than to snooze in the desert, became something else, something out of control. It was a case of one thing leading to another, leading to another. And then all of it—or most of it, anyway—crashing and burning.

  Harry hit an early snag. He was originally called Harry the Lazy Camel, but this ran foul of the UAE authorities on the grounds that a camel was one of Allah’s creations and so could not have any defects. So Harry the Lazy Camel became simply Harry the Camel.

  The children’s books in Harry’s name definitely reflected what was going on in my desert vet life. They had started with a simple drawing of a camel and then spread to include all the wildlife I had come into contact with. The fearsome camel spider, Boris, became the bad guy in the Harry books. In the case of the graceful, mystical oryx, which had become a personal favourite of mine, I laboured hard to produce the most beautiful drawing I could.

  I expanded on the first two Harry the Camel books with two more. The third told the story of Harry getting lost; straying from his desert home, he wound up in the mountains, where he met new species of beasts, such as the Arabian leopard. Harry ended up declaring that he never wanted to be lost again. I dedicated this book to Katya and Erica, my oldest girls. The fourth book depicted Harry’s adventures on a trip to China and was dedicated to my dad.

  From children’s books I also started filing a regular weekly cartoon strip for Dubai’s English-language newspaper; it too was based on Harry the Camel. The cartoons showed a more complex side to Harry and they often reflected how I was feeling, both good and bad. The cartoon strip, in turn, gave a great boost to the Harry the Camel books. Read by the UAE’s expat population, this helped Harry take off as a multimedia personality.

  I joined up with partners and next thing we were designing new versions of the Harry T-shirts. Then I expanded the T-shirt range to include other desert animals and we started selling the T-shirts at Dubai Duty Free, which gets a massive number of tourists.

  My Harry-inspired enterprises were spreading far and wide. Tourists from all corners of the globe came to Al Ain for the camel safaris into the desert. Australian and American soldiers on R and R came along for the ride as well.

  There was a touch of international glamour when Vogue magazine contacted us from New York to arrange a photographic shoot in the desert with model Heike Grebenstein in various poses with our camels. The shoot was made memorable when a Pakistani camel handler grabbed hold of Heike’s bottom with one hand as he trailed behind her, camels in tow in the other hand. As she walked past us, Heike turned to me and asked, rhetorically perhaps, in her New York drawl, ‘Is this guy meant to be holding my ass?’

  Harry was on his way to becoming a superstar, and I was ready to ride the train. I lived with the feeling that life was short: I had direct experience that anything could happen at any time. It made me restless, needing to do more and different things.

  I met with new partners who talked big about having the Walt Disney Company sign up Harry and take him to the world. We had exploratory meetings. We had follow-up meetings. We had planning meetings. We joined up with an international entertainment company as co-developers of the concept. We flew to the Philippines and commissioned animation projects. We produced a five-minute pilot of a Harry the Camel episode, which turned my one dimensional hand-drawn Harry into a walking, talking, potential television star.

  In the fever of the moment we imagined we were onto something bigger than Bart Simpson. Ultimately, though, someone deemed that an American audience was unlikely to take well to a series set in the Middle East with the symbol of Arabia as its star.

  I ended up losing a bundle on the Harry animation project that went nowhere, and it wasn’t the only one. The thing about the UAE is that there’s always an opportunist around who’ll feed your dreams and take you for a ride. It attracts the hucksters and spivs of the world, like bees to a honeypot. Ultimately I was ripped off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars because of my schemes and dreams. And it was always by other expats, never a local.

  Losing money was one thing. Losing the plot was another.

  If I had to pinpoint one moment when my Harry obsession might have got the better of me it was when I invented a camel language. It really was quite elaborate. I published a Harry the Camel diary, which offered 365 camel language words, one for every day of the year. They were all based around the ‘cam’ of ‘camel’. ‘Comments’ became ‘camments’. ‘Cambay’ was an Indian city famous for its film industry. ‘Camtipasto’ was a plate of mixed camel appetisers. ‘Congratulations’ became ‘camgratulations’. ‘Camilla Parker Bowles’ needed no change to her name but was explained as a ‘camtroversial’ figure involved with a member of the British royal family. And so on, and so on. You get the drift.

  To be fair to a man who was obviously in the grip of an obsession, this was my way of doing everything I could to take my love of camels to the world. The camel is always the animal shoved in the corner at the zoo. Knowing what I know about the camel, it stuck in my craw that it was taken for granted or, worse, seen as a bit of an oddity.

  I knew there was so much more to them. I love the temperament of the camel, never skittish or panicky. You can see it in the way they keep their line when they cross a road: they don’t care if a car comes along, they keep walking and don’t get fazed and suddenly gallop off. If a camel gets caught in a barbed wire fence, it doesn’t freak out but just waits for you to come and release it. A horse would thrash around, but a camel goes, ‘You know what? I’ll just sit here and wait.’ They have the confidence to know they can deal with everything and an intrinsic intelligence that they don’t get credit for.

  Indeed, my infatuation with the camel was complete. And that’s saying a lot for someone who is not given to emotional flights of fancy when it comes to animals.

  My collecting of camel paraphernalia—or perhaps that should be ‘camaphernalia’—took off. Pride of place above my bed was
an original painting of our first embryo mother, Sumha, captured in full regal pose in the desert. There were photos of our baby camels dotted through the house and frames of winning camels on the walls and cabinets. I found an old walking stick with a carved ivory handle shaped like a camel head, something that might have come out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. From Jordan I brought back a camel scene depicted in a glass case using layers of different coloured sands.

  As I travelled the world on camel business I would invariably find more that took my fancy. There was a full camel saddle from Rajasthan. Also from India I brought back a long wooden bench seat with camel heads at either end. In Mongolia I was captivated by a two-humped camel carved out of a piece of tree root. From Turkey and Iran came floor rugs with various camel shapes embroidered in them.

  On a trip to Paris I discovered a superb post-modern rendering in metal, which captured the essence of a camel in full gallop—I assume it is post-modern because most of the camel is missing, merely a hollowed-out body with the outer shell of a head, chest, front legs and hump, with tail flying behind. A case of less definitely being more.

  Then there are the things from the Arabian Peninsula that go with a camel: the camel stick used traditionally to thwack a camel into line and the heavy silver chain used to pull a camel along.

  If you did an inventory of my house you would find maybe a hundred different camel paintings, photographs, carvings, sculptures, embroideries and assorted accoutrements. At the whacky end, I acquired cloth camel heads to cover my golf clubs. If anyone’s a camel tragic, it’s me.

  It may well be the case that my attempts to spread the word on my passion have fallen victim to some dodgy business dealings along the way. Fundamentally, though, I was well intentioned, a bit like Harry the Camel himself. I had to remind myself that the further I got away from my real scientific work with the camels, the worse I did. If I was faithful to that, it always repaid me, with success. Finally my frenetic, rampaging camel-mania crystallised into something that really did make sense.