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TRADITIONAL CAMEL HERDERS ARE CONCERNED
We’ve worked with nomadic camel herders in rural Mongolia and in the deserts of Arabia, where camels live without fencing restrictions and are milked by hand. Herders there are concerned about the shift towards mega-dairies, where milk is produced on an industrial scale.
International camel herder participants who gathered at one recent workshop in Rajasthan, India, released a statement saying they reject the “extractive model of animal production that was first superimposed on many camelid countries in colonial times”. They are wary of adopting a model for industrialised camel keeping that is “dependent on fossil fuels, chemical inputs and imported feed”.
Humans have worked with camels throughout history. Camels enabled long-distance trade, served in armies, carried military equipment, sustained family livelihoods, and contributed to early industrialisation. Today they are the face of many tourist brochures.
The emerging trend of industrialised camel farming, based on maximising milk production through enclosure and control of mobility, should cause us to pause and reflect. We are wary of what all this means for nomadic camel herders who produce fine wool fibre, milk, diverse dairy products and meat, using centuries-old animal husbandry knowledge and customs.
Ariell Ahearn is Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography, and Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration at University of Oxford. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
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