More On Camels.

I received a letter from America saying, “We see very few camels here. Once in a while out in the country, there will be one or two, but they belong to the people who live there and have bought them. They are not wild. We never see one just loose out in the field with no owner.” Obviously they just don’t have wild Camels over there, like we do here in Oz. A fact that I found interesting, as I know that in America’s early history, they too used Camels for transport and exploration in the desert areas and that they too were released into the wild when no longer needed. So at first you would think that they would have spread there too, but they didn’t. Why?

Different conditions that’s why! It is surprising to many, but if you overlay a scale model of the map of Australia over the map of America (without Alaska) and turn it sideways, you will be surprised to find that there is not that much difference in size really. Yet America has something near 300 million people and we have just a little over 20 million. (22 or 23, I think?)

Also although of similar size on paper, much of Australia is arid or semi arid (read desert) country. So if you take a larger desert area, you have a larger need for camels initially. I don’t know how many were let into the wild in America but I feel pretty safe in saying it was nothing near the 20,000 released here in the 1930’s. Also with the lack of people encroaching on their new domain, the Camels had very little competition from humans and with no meat eating predators larger than our Dingo (Wild dog) they had few problems or competition, hence unrestricted multiplication took place, till there is now over half a million running around the Top End of Australia. (Apparently, although I got this figure from this month’s Newspaper that info is 8 years old. According to June 20007 Reader’s Digest, the number is now one million and the camel population is doubling every 8 years!)

I don’t know how it appears to you, but the above illustration helps me to see how it seems that some people seem to handle things better than me although on the surface everything seems similar to what I am experiencing. It is not that they are per se’ better (or worse) than me! More that their circumstances are different although similar looking or sounding.

That is why we should always be careful of making judgements on how others seem to be handling things without close inspection of all the facts, from all angels. How see it you? Walter