Selling camels to the Saudis
Does Saudi Arabia import camels from Australia? A SMALL number of camels were imported to Australia in the 19th century from the Middle East for heavy work in the outback. With the advent of motor vehicles they were no longer needed and hundreds were released into the wild.
With no natural predators and vast areas in which to roam, the camels flourished, so that by 2009 there was an estimated feral population of one million. This has had a detrimental impact on the wilderness environment as camels drink large amounts of water, causing damage to waterholes used by farmers and Aborigines.
Saudi Arabia has a different problem. Camel meat is eaten on special occasions and hundreds of thousands of camels are slaughtered every year during the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, in Mecca.
This has led to a dearth of the animals in the country. In 2002, a shipment of 100 camels was imported from A ustralia to help, but it proved logistically very difficult and the programme was ended.
By 2009, the camel problem was getting out of hand and the Australian Feral Camel Management P roject was established. Under the programme, 160,000 camels were culled over a four -year period at a cost of about £9.5 million.
Feral camel meat is legally produced on Aboriginal reservations. Much is supplied by an indigenous camel company run by Ngaanyatjarra Council on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia and by camels mustered on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands of South Australia.
It’s processed at a multi-species abattoir at Caboolture in Queensland and at Samex Australian Meat Company in P eterborough, South A ustralia, for the export market and for pet food production.
Large- scale camel exports have been hampered by the lack of a suitable vessel. In 2014, billionaire Saudi livestock exporter Hamood al Khalaf converted former 2,300 TEU container ship Guanabara into the Awassi Express, a livestock carrier with approximately 22,000 square metres of livestock capacity that can handle ship - ments of 75,000 sheep or 22,000 cattle.
The vessel has specially modified doors which would enable the transport of camels pending an agreement with the Australian government.
tom Davies, sydney. Why was Edgar Allen Poe court-martialled? EdGAR POE (1809-49) excelled in everything he did; he was an expert in athletics, learning, prose, poetry, criticism, military training and behaviour.
His parents were actors and his Irish immigrant grandfather, david, was Brevet General Poe, compatriot of the Marquis de Lafayette in the War of Independence. By the time he was two, Edgar’s parents were dead and he was unofficially adopted by John and Frances Allan, who gave him the name of Allan.
He did well at school and persuaded John to send him to the University of Richmond, but being under-funded he turned to gam - bling and left after a year with big debts.
He tried to make a living by writing , then joined the army in 1827 as P rivate Edgar Perry and in two years he was a company sergeant-major. When Frances died, he became reconciled with John Allan, who bought him out of the regular army to train as an officer at West Point Military Academy. After a year in which he did well, he decided to leave, but John wouldn’t buy him out again.
To be released from W est P oint, P oe stopped going to lectures and parades and refused duties. He was arrested ‘for absenting himself from his academic duties’. On February 8, he was court-martialled for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders. Poe doesn’t appear to have offered any real defence and he was quickly found guilty and sentenced to be dismissed from the Academy, effective March 6.
Before his departure he solicited subscriptions among his fellow students for a new edition of his poems.
Out of 232 cadets, 131 put up $1.25 each to cover the cost of publication — suggesting Poe wasn’t the forbidding , friendless outcast of popular imagination. Soon after his arrival in New Y ork, the volume (dedicated to The U .S. Corps of Cadets) appeared in print, containing among other now-famous poems To Helen, Israfel and Irene (later retitled The Sleeper.)
Though living modestly , Poe invented the detective story (The Murders In The Rue Morgue), perfected the short horror story and invented the modern science fiction story (The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaall, the story of a trip to the moon). Chris Huck, Peterborough. In 1966 a Morris Minor Traveller was sent to RAF Gan, an island in the Maldives a mileand-a-quarter long and a quarter of a mile wide, with a single road running the length of it. Have other vehicles been known to operate in such restricted conditions? FURTHER to earlier answers, I worked on RAF Gan as a water and sanitation engi - neer several times during 1995, 15 years or so after the RAF left.
There never was a road running the length of the island, I assume previous answers are referring to the runway. There was a tarmac road that ran around the edge of the island, crossing the runway at both ends.
When I worked there, the island was virtually untouched after the RAF had departed and the only car there was a Toyota used by the atoll chief, who had an office in the old CO’s HQ, and accommodation in the original officers’ quarters (where I also lived).
The island was by that time connected by a causeway to the adjoining island of Feydhoo and it was possible to drive 15 miles or so over further connecting causeways through several other islands.
C. smith, Braintree, Essex.