Camel meat is being served to top Australian officials at a barbeque in Canberra as an environmental group advocates culling the Australian herd.
With one million feral camels, Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre reports that camels are destroying the natural habitat and interfering with the aborigines.
The centre is presenting its three-year study to federal, state and territory government officials.
It is recommending that eating camel may be one of the most effective means to cull the herds.
”It’s a bit like beef. It’s as lean as lean, it’s an excellent health food,” said Murray McGregor, co-author of the report.
McGregor said spitting camels or their ugly faces should not deter diners.
The centre’s Glenn Edwards elaborated further:
“There are parts of the landscape where camels occur, like the Simpson Desert for example, where there just is no infrastructure out there, there’s no roads, and if you want to manage camel impacts out there the only way you can actually do it is to get into a helicopter and shoot them.
“There are other places where there are camels where there is infrastructure, and those areas will be able to accommodate the commercial use of camels; that’s harvesting for things like pet meat, meat for human consumption, and so on.”
Three months ago, the country’s National Climate Advisor recommended eating kangaroos for the same reasons.
Put a little camel next to the kangaroo meat on that barbie. Yum.
Wouldn’t it be cool if they could somehow round up the wild herds and ship them to Haiti, Somalia, any poor tribes in Africa, North and South Korea? The people who live in these places would be happy to butcher the camels for the meat and it wouldn’t go to waste. It’s just the logistics of getting the wild camels from here to there. That would be the hard part.