Mick Hartley

Should Australia's feral camels be slaughtered? The question isn't new. There are over a million of the buggers roaming around unchecked in the outback, tearing up vegetation, fouling ponds and streams, and besieging remote townships in their ceaseless quest for water. Should they just be shot like wild dogs? – or culled for meat perhaps? Or even exported back to Arabia, from whence they came, where there's a thriving market for racing camels and where top beauty camels can be worth up to $5m apiece? No one's done a survey yet as far as I'm aware on how Australian camels match up on the beauty scale, but there must surely be a few stunners out there.

The problem is, they're spread over such a huge area that it's barely worth the effort to go after them. Until now, that is. Now someone's done the calculations and worked out that killing them may be the green option. Because they fart too much:

The kill-a-camel suggestion is floated in a paper distributed by Australia's Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, as part of consultations for reducing the country's carbon footprint.

The scheme is the brainchild of an Adelaide-based commercial company, Northwest Carbon, a land and animal management consultancy, which proposes whacking feral camels in exchange for carbon credits….

Each camel, according to the champions of a cull, emits 45 kilos (99 pounds) of methane, the equivalent of one tonne a year in carbon dioxide (CO2), the main warming gas.

Northwest Carbon says it would shoot the camels from helicopters or corral them before sending them to an abattoir for eating by humans or pets.

I see a tiny flaw there, since helicopters are hardly carbon-neutral. But anyway, camel-lovers are fighting back:

ISOCARD [the International Society of Camelid Research and Development], an association of more than 300 researchers headquartered at al Ain University in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said the calculations were absurd.

"The estimation of methane emission by camels is based on cattle data extrapolation," it said in a press release.

"The metabolic efficiency of camel is higher than that of cattle, (…) camels are able to produce 20-percent more milk by eating 20-percent less food, they have different digestive system and are more efficient in the utilization of poor quality roughages," it noted.

In addition, the bacterial flora of camel intestines means their digestion is closer to that of monogastric animals, such as pigs, rather than as cattle and sheep, said ISOCARD.

"Therefore, the estimation of camel methane emission is quite debatable, as well as the estimated feral population."

The 28 million camels in the world represent less than one percent of all vegetation-eating biomass, and their emissions are just a tiny fraction of those made by cattle, it argued.

"The feral dromedary camels should be seen as an incomparable resource in arid environments," the group said. "They can and should be exploited for food (meat and milk), skin and hides, tourism etcetera."