A three-year study from the Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre has outlined the devastating effects of feral camels on the Australian environment. The report was released on Tusday and can be found here.
The report was also presented to a CSIRO sponsored conference on camels held in Canberra on Wednesday. Over 70 camel experts attended including scientists, farmers and even the owner of the country’s only camel specific abattoir (Territory Camel, situated just outside Alice Springs).
In brief the report outlines:
- That Australia’s feral camel population is now estimated at over one million, set to double by 2017.
- Camel’s do $15 million worth of damage to infrastructure and farming land annually beyond serious damage to ecosystems.
- That wetlands in the NT are serious under threat because large herds are drinking too much water from the waterholes crucial to a wide variety of other native flora and fauna.
- That as climate change intensifies and water dries up camels are likely to expand to new areas in Australia, including farming land.
The report recommends among other things:
- The humane aerial culling be expanded.
- The a camel ”market” by supported and associated industries including the camel meat industry be expanded.
- That numbers be decreased by 400 000 in the next ten years.
I wrote a short, if not light, article for The Age which was printed on Wednesday here. However, I strongly recommend the report to get across the entire problem which appears to have intensified in the last decade.
Camels at NT watering hole PHOTO: R. Bugg
