The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  There are striking stories about the largesse of the sheikhs. Some are certainly apocryphal, but others are very real.

  In 2008 in Dubai, Ethinam—one of the camels from our reproduction program—won her third Gold Cup in successive years as she graduated through her age groups. She was our version of Makybe Diva, three times consecutive winner of the Melbourne Cup. In honour of this, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, presented our trainer with a black Bentley Continental GT, along with Dubai numberplates bearing the number ‘4’. The lower the number, the greater the value of the numberplate, so this was probably three times more valuable than the car itself. This was on top of the 250,000 dollars or so in prize money.

  Another time at a camel race meeting in the north of the UAE, Sheikh Sultan purchased thirty-five promising young camels. They were a good acquisition for the president’s herd. The cost was enormous, probably no less than twenty million dollars, and the transactions all happened in a couple of days.

  In Al Ain, the senior Emiratis working on behalf of the president will snap up the fastest of the young camels competing in smaller backblocks races. They might pay around 250,000 to 300,000 dollars for a single camel, which isn’t a bad take-home amount for a Bedouin trainer chancing his arm.

  The camel beauty contest, too, always offers the chance for a relatively poor Bedouin to sell his pretty little camel ‘up’ to the sheikhs. It’s a windfall for the less well-off citizens and it’s also a win for the sheikh, who gets a faster or more beautiful camel. The decisions are always quick and the deal is done on a handshake. The camel changes hands immediately and the Bedouin collect their money pretty soon after.

  On one level, the money around the camel races is big because the Emiratis are competitive about who has the best camel and, of course, this drives the prices up. But some families and tribes are not business-oriented and they haven’t prospered as much as others from the country’s oil riches. Passing the wealth around through camel racing and trading helps these tribes preserve a traditional lifestyle and values, but at the same time gives them support without the need to go begging to the sheikh for money.

  This system has been a potent force in maintaining stability inside the UAE, in a region that is constantly on the boil. It is a fundamental reason the UAE has remained untroubled and untouched by the uprisings which spread across the Arab world from late 2009. Even in the post-GFC era, the camel money on offer has gone up, not down.

  There is serious prize money, as well as cars, to be won, even in the more obscure meetings. In Qatar I attended a mid-level race—not even the main race—where there were 250 cars for prizes. The winner of the third-last race received a McLaren concept car. The winner of the second-last race received 600,000 dollars. For the last race, the winner took home one and a half million dollars.

  As far as the sheikhs are concerned, one of the biggest threats to the camel social security system is drugs. Every time my sheikh buys a camel that has run a fantastic time, we test it to make sure it is not on EPO or some other illegal substance to increase its speed. I have also carried out drug testing at the local races, though now I am usually only involved in the big international races.

  Some guys have even tried their hand at blood doping. This has produced the occasional disaster when they take the blood from one camel and inject it into another. And it threatens the fairness of the races, the chance for the little Bedouin from the desert backblocks to come up with a belter of a camel that he can sell to the sheikhs.

  The sheikhs’ number-one obsession these days is to try to find out what everyone is using, to find out who’s cheating. The most likely offenders are the Bedouin trainers and owners, who are very well connected and have access to illegal medicines. Penalties have gone through the roof. It’s no different to the Tour de France or horseracing. Drugs are more sophisticated than they were five or ten years ago. If it’s being used with humans or with horses, then chances are it is being used with camels. In the 1990s the camel races were pretty much immune from this sort of thing, but now, courtesy of the internet, people with the intent can get anything from anywhere.

  It took a few attempts, but before too long we achieved huge success in the camel beauty contests.

  Mabrokan had proven himself too fickle when it came to the other beautiful Hazmis, so we used the services of another bull, owned by a sheikh from the western region of Abu Dhabi. The mother was Naifa, and she produced a real star called Nazar. We had bred a few good ones, but we knew from the moment she was born that Nazar was the pièce de résistance. Even as a calf she was a giant. Her coat was jet black and all her proportions were right.

  By now the Liwa beauty contest was a major Gulf event, with close to thirty thousand camels and about the same number of owners and handlers arriving from across the sands. The roadway leading to the camel show ring had been officially named ‘Millionaires Road’, as a nod to the money changing hands with the buying and selling of camels. If anything, the beauty contest had become bigger than the races, so again the pressure was well and truly on.

  In 2012 we entered Nazar there as a young calf and she took out the title in her class. The following year Nazar went in as a yearling and won several different classes, including the prize for most beautiful baby camel. She went through to the finals to be pitted against the winners from all classes—and she did it. Nazar took out the biggest prize of all: best in show.

  Upon hearing the announcement, a member of the Saudi royal family was overcome with emotion. He literally jumped out of the stands, burst into the judging ring and started reciting poetry to Nazar, in florid tribute to what an amazing animal she was. On the spot the Saudi royal offered Sheikh Sultan eight million dollars for this most beautiful specimen. He was smitten and wanted this camel bad. Sheikh Sultan knocked him back.

  The Saudi royal’s ardour was understandable. Nazar not only won best in show but she did it with a perfect ten out of ten, which is why I’ve nicknamed her Nadia, after the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci who was the first to ever get a perfect score at the Olympics.

  Nazar’s brothers and sisters have also won a clutch of medals, but Nazar is the absolute standout. One of our embryo babies, she is both the most beautiful and the most valuable camel on the planet. With her big liquid brown eyes and long, long eyelashes, she has the bearing of a Hollywood starlet. You half expect her to emerge from her own private caravan, with sunglasses and a list of outrageous demands. It hardly seems right that she should have to bend her neck down to scoop out feed with the others.

  As it is, Nazar resides in specially built luxury stables equipped with air-conditioning to keep her coat in tip-top condition. There are two or three handlers constantly by her side, even sleeping with her at night.

  The camel boys have now rechristened me ‘Abu Nazar’ (father of Nazar). But she can cause me more sleepless nights than any teenager. Whenever she gets sick, it’s a major stress time. If she sneezes, I worry. Still.

  And what of Mabrokan? Well, he met a premature end and never got to see the success of Nazar. While being fed with lucerne he developed a bout of bloat, which is common in cattle but very rare in a camel. The giant evidently became afflicted in the middle of the day and, uncharacteristically, there was no-one around to see what was happening for the first hour, even though he was meant to be under 24/7 watch. By the time the handlers realised it, Mabrokan was on death’s door. And by the time the vet got to him, he was dead.

  Perhaps luckily for me, I was in Rome that day. I was in the middle of lunch in a restaurant when I got the phone call telling me Mabrokan was dead. I told the vet back in Al Ain to cut out Mabrokan’s testicles, take a sample of his skin and to store it all in the freezer. I thought by at least preserving parts of him we might be able to clone him later. But bellowing instructions about what to do with a camel’s balls in the middle of a crowded Roman restaurant left the other patrons somewhat nonplussed, judging from the looks on their faces.

  I
flew back to Al Ain within twenty-four hours to help process the remains and generally get on top of what had been a big disaster. Five million dollars’ worth of camel had died a perfectly preventable death, all because no-one was watching.

  Mabrokan had already been dead a couple of hours before parts of him were cut out and frozen, but it was a step worth taking. In the meantime, Sheikh Sultan took his own steps to preserve Mabrokan. He decided to send his body to Paris to have him stuffed—all one thousand kilograms of him. He was then freighted back to the UAE to take up permanent residence in the sheikh’s car museum.

  People wonder how you could seriously have a beauty pageant for camels and, even more, how a camel could ever be valued at eight million dollars just for its looks. But Arabs probably wonder why you would put a bull in the show ring. They would say, ‘Hang on, we’re showing an animal worth seven million dollars—we’re showing something significant, while you’re showing something worth twenty thousand dollars.’ That’s what happens when you have people who are fanatical about an animal and have the money to match their passion.

  From my point of view, the beauty camel phenomenon had been a blessing because it gave another string to my bow in a year when success was coming in spades.

  Twenty-eight

  The Golden Sword

  At the end of the day, if you don’t perform on your home turf and win the big cups and the Golden Swords in front of your boss, then it’s not a good look. It took twenty-five years after first coming to Al Ain, but in 2013 everything we had worked for seemed to be finally coming together.

  The 2013 carnival season had been our most successful on record. That year we won a dozen Gold Cups at races in the premier carnivals at Qatar and Dubai; twenty years previously we were overjoyed to win just one Gold Cup. Now it was the last day of the carnival season, at the end of two weeks of racing at home in Abu Dhabi.

  We had bred a champion female called Theeba (‘wolf’), who was performing out of her skin and had already picked up a Gold Cup at the Dubai meeting held earlier. There was a lot of expectation that today she would take the Golden Sword, which goes to the winner of the open-age female category. It is the most prestigious prize of all and is run as the final race on the final day of the carnival. The prize money is one million dirhams, the equivalent of about 300,000 dollars, but, as ever, the money hardly mattered.

  The meeting was held at the Al Wathba racetrack, the same track I had come to fresh off a plane from Australia twenty-five years before. I had turned up there with no clue as to how a race was run in the Arab Gulf and had received an instant education in how their society works when the late President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed, arrived to an ecstatic greeting from the assembled Bedouin and sheikhs. I had watched the day unfold from a seat in a temporary tent, surrounded by Sheikh Zayed’s presidential guard and with the barrel of a Kalashnikov kind-of shoved up my left nostril.

  Back then Al Wathba was a single dirt track with a tent as a temporary grandstand. Now it had been developed into a massive complex. There were two separate racing tracks: a shorter one for younger camels, with a four-, five- or six-kilometre loop, and an eight-kilometre track, where we were racing today, for the adult camels. There was a huge concrete and glass grandstand, from where spectators could watch proceedings unfold in air-conditioned comfort. The entrance to the complex was arrayed with the flags of all the Gulf countries, framing large photographs of the national leaders.

  Racing was now covered live for television from every conceivable angle. There was a drone beaming out pictures from overhead, camera crews followed the race from both sides of the track, and cameras were embedded in the track itself, putting viewers smack in the middle of the action. Throughout the carnival a nightly television show featured camel pundits from around the Gulf, dissecting the results of the day and offering their analysis on what the next day’s racing would bring.

  A gigantic photograph of the late president, Sheikh Zayed, dominated the grassed area in the middle of the track. Directly underneath the photograph of Sheikh Zayed the prizes were on display: 150 new Range Rovers, Mercedes, Lamborghinis and other luxury brands, lined up in neat rows and ready to be driven away. Next to the grandstand was the yard from where camel handlers walked their charges down to the starting blocks. There was also a VIP majlis, reserved as a meeting place for the senior sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar, and off to the side of the racetrack two giant Medivac helicopters were on stand-by.

  On this the final day, the Bedouin owners had arrived just after dawn, filling the car park with four-wheel drives and utes, in time for their camel races, which took up the morning schedule. After a break the afternoon session was devoted to the final three, the most prestigious races, involving the best camels owned by the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar. In the lead-up there were a series of special events: a military display, parachutists and a traditional local custom called the hair dance, where a troupe of women sway their heads in rhythm, swinging their hair from side to side.

  When I watched my first race here twenty-five years before, there was a long wait for the main race before Sheikh Zayed arrived in his Pullman from across the desert. Now events were run more tightly.

  The final race was due to start at 2pm. At 1.40 you could hear a helicopter coming in from the north and landing five minutes’ drive away at a helipad. This was Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, the Crown Prince of Dubai. A couple of minutes later another helicopter arrived from the west, this one bearing my boss, Sheikh Sultan.

  The sheikhs were then driven from the helipad to the track, choreographed to arrive at about the same time, so they all got to shake hands and rub noses in the traditional way.

  The Crown Prince of Dubai emerged from his black Mercedes four-wheel drive, with the numberplate ‘11’, accompanied by an entourage of four or five cars. His father, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, had an identical car, which carried the plate number ‘1’.

  There was no need to announce the arrivals of the sheikhs. Everyone knew who they were from the direction their helicopters had flown in.

  In the old days, when Sheikh Zayed was alive, he would bring the rulers of the seven emirates to the track for the last day. Sheikh Khalifa followed that tradition for a few years, too, along with the next tier of sheikhs. So you might have had fifty sheikhs in the grandstand, with full-on security.

  But times have changed and it is now impossible for all the sheikhs to get away. Yet still the ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai made sure they were there.

  After the friendly introductions and warm smiles, the sheikhs returned to their cars so they could follow the race from a VIP road built on the inside of the racetrack. From now on, it was war.

  The grandstand was filled with about two thousand people, mostly Bedouin but also some sheikhs. One disadvantage of the grandstand is that, while it gives you a great view of the start and the track, it is a long way from the action. After a minute or so the camels are well off into the distance, so you don’t have any sense of the unfolding drama. Others took the option of piling into their cars to follow the camels at ground level, from a road on the outside of the track. This is an area about a hundred metres wide, which accommodates around two hundred utes, pickups and other assorted vehicles as they thunder along with locals hanging out the windows or popping out through the roof of their cars, screaming and yelling encouragement for their camel.

  My head trainer, Rashid, was in his own four-wheel drive on yet another road built inside the track. From here he could control the tiny stainless steel robot ‘jockey’ strapped to Theeba’s hump. The robots represented another dramatic change from the first time I had witnessed a race. In 2002, after international human rights pressure, the UAE became the first Gulf state to put a stop to the practice of using young children as jockeys. After being sent to the UAE from poor countries like Bangladesh and Sudan, some had been injured while others had even died. It was the right thing to do, and it
turned out that camels actually ran faster with the lighter weight. The robot weighs only two kilograms and is equipped with a whip, which the trainer can activate by remote control. Normally, though, the whip is hardly used. Instead, Rashid talks to the camel through a two-way on the robot. He was one of thirty trainers in control cars jostling for position to keep close to their camels.

  Rashid had a camel camp about a kilometre away from the track, and I had repaired to the quiet of his majlis there for the big race. Only three of us were present: my chief veterinary assistant, Dr Kuhad, Rashid’s oldest son, Diab, and me. For me it was more important to watch the live television coverage and get the view from all angles than to be there in person. You don’t get quite the same sense of excitement and adrenalin as being trackside, but it’s a lot better for getting the full picture of how the race is unfolding.

  I was confident Theeba could win this race, but anything can happen on the day. And of course, other Abu Dhabi trainers and the staff from Qatar and Dubai were also determined to take out the Golden Sword.

  What eventuated was one of the most extraordinary races I’ve ever witnessed.

  The thirty or so camels were lined up ready to go behind the long barrier, essentially a thin sheet of brown plastic attached to a metal frame. At the signal a mechanical arm lifted the barrier and they thundered off.

  Following them were cars on three different roadways: one on the inside of the track for the sheikhs, another on the inside of the track for the trainers and the third on the outside for friends, family and barrackers.

  It wasn’t long before I started to feel very uneasy. I was looking for Theeba’s colours in the throng but still couldn’t see them. In the president’s colours of red augmented with gold trim, which was Rashid’s signature, she should have been obvious. But out in front from the start were the camels with black and white saddlecloth, the colours of the ruler of Dubai.