Camel Wrestling For Fun And Profit

Okay, I'm kind of joking about the "Profit" part.

Thinking on my time at the zoo, we had this camel case. Their big bull camel (here we're talking Dromedaries) had bitten one of his offspring in the hump. Now, you wouldn't think it to look at them, nor would you think it when you consider that they're herbivores, but male camels have long, sharp canine teeth. These are a set of four big fangs used, one assumes, primarily for fighting with other camels - although every so often someone turns their back on an irritable bull and gets bitten fatally in the head, because I am assured that if a camel can get his mouth around your skull, he's more than capable of crushing it like a melon, and that the long daggers of his teeth can punch right through a human skull, particularly over the thinner temporal bone.

Hmm. THAT'S a vivid image, isn't it?

It seems a bit counter-intuitive, actually. Camels have a pacing gait - they use the two legs on one side of the body in tandem, rather than going left-right-left-right the way (say) horses generally do. This gives them an elegant, leisurely sway and a rather stately air, which is compounded by their long, gracefully-curved necks and the lofty height of their heads, from which they gaze down upon you through luxuriant lashes with their large, liquid dark eyes. This doesn't reconcile so easily with the idea of fatal head-biting. Nor does it seem to fit with the mental image of such an aloof, high-headed animal suddenly reaching down to bite a baby's hump completely through, but there you are.

Apparently the bull camel at the zoo felt that his young son was being a sufficient pain in the hump - er, rump - that he decided to indicate his displeasure in as unequivocal a way as possible, with the result that the calf had four deep punctures, two on either side of the midline of his little baby hump. Not surprisingly, this is the kind of injury where infection would be a real danger, with the potential for much resultant and disastrous sloughing, or possibly even the risk of death. So, this meant that every afternoon for nearly my entire tenure at the zoo, we assembled a crew of medical staff and went over to the camel house for a little camel wrestling.

The calf - and here I know you'll be surprised - was really not all THAT into being separated from his mother and treated every day. Hence a certain amount of trickery was involved.

First, four of us arrive at the camel house, armed with antibiotics and scrub and flush and dressings. The keeper meets us there. Before anything else can be done, the bull has to be separated from the group. The bull does not like this idea and lays his ears back and tightens his large, velvety lips with every evidence of annoyance. He paces purposefully forward, glaring down at us from an impressive height and making low, menacing rumbling noises in his chest. If you have never stood near a camel making this noise, let me tell you: It's a bit creepy. It apparently resonates at a frequency capable of penetrating your tissues and setting up a vibrato in your viscera. This is not at all painful, but it somehow ignites an intense desire to be elsewhere. Suddenly you are restless, twitchy, anxious to be gone. Once you realize what's happening, of course, you have control of it... but it takes you unawares at first, dumping adrenaline into your bloodstream, driving your heart and lungs, making the hair stir on the back of your neck.

Once the bull has been lured away and gated off (to his great displeasure), the cow and calf are coaxed into the barn. The cow is lured strait through and out the other side, and the calf is unceremoniously detained, with the help of our little camel press-gang. The keeper closes the barn door, trapping the cow outside, and our little gang nabs the calf, looping arms around his elegant neck, haltering his head, blocking his hurried backward shuffle, and (as quickly as possible) blindfolding him. This has the multiple purpose of protecting his large, expressive eyes from injury during restraint, making him less capable of escape, and of decreasing his stress as much as we are able to do and still treat him.

There follows quite a lot of scuffling and various breathless grunting and swearing as the camel calf - who cannot weigh above an hundred and fifty pounds - starts tossing the rest of us around, surging forward for freedom, swinging his head at us like a sledgehammer, kicking and stomping and bawling for his mother (who is bellowing herself, accompanied from the other side of the barn by the incessant gargling rumbles of the bull). I, as the smallest member of our crew, have the job of flushing out the wounds and then packing them with antibiotic ointment whilst the rest of the gang do their damnedest to make sure I don't get trampled to death in the process. Five adults it takes to compel this 150# calf to take his medicine, and we are barely enough. Five adults barely fit in a cluster around this little calf, not more than a few months old, but he is nearly equal to us even so.

I go as fast as I can and still get the job done. The holes in the calf's hump are so deep I can sink my index finger to the last knuckle and still not quite reach the end of the punctures. Two of them nearly meet in the middle, a centimeter from being a through-and-through puncture of the entire width of the hump. The first day was the hardest, both for this reason and because we had to clip the hair away from the wounds, so we spent much longer that day. But even after the punctures start to granulate in and grow shallower with the passing days, it's quite a chore to simultaneously brace my weight against the heaving sides of the calf and at the same time clean and pack the wounds, squinting against the dust we are raising, jostled and bumped on either side by vet and techs and keeper as they strain to keep the calf from running us all over as I treat the left side, and then as I hurry around to treat the right.

At the end of all that, Dr. K injects a wad of antibiotics into the calf and we all peel off like the gantries falling away from a launching rocket: the keeper mans the barn door, and we unhalter and un-blindfold the calf, releasing him as the keeper opens the door and we all melt as fast as possible back into the building. Camels are in general relatively calm - apart from when the bulls are rutting - but the last thing we want to do is hang around to see how forgiving (or not) the cow is.

The very last order of buisness is to open up the opposite side of the barn so that the pass-through is unobstructed and the bull camel is free. The bull, the moment he is released, wastes no time in striding through the barn to inspect his herd, gargling and rumbling, ropey green saliva trailing from his mouth as he grinds his lower jaw from side to side in agitation.

I felt bad for the camel calf, being trapped and wrestled every afternoon, although I did feel good about the fact that his hump neither became infected nor sloughed. I'm sure it wasn't fun for him, and of course he had no way to know that we were doing it to save his life and prevent permanent disfigurement. I will say my sympathies were squarely on him, most of the time - although I admit they were a bit strained from time to time, as (for instance) when he sidestepped and mashed me against the barn wall hard enough to drive all the breath out of me, or when one of his flailing knees caught me in the thigh.

Okay, so I guess I'm kind of joking about the "Fun" part, too - but I wasn't kidding around about the "Wrestling" part. The WWF ain't got nothing on us.