No more cash to keep feral camels under control
IT LOOKS like a scene from some remote desert in the Middle East — a vast herd of wild camels stampeding across sand dunes and stunted spinifex.
But it is Australia’s red heart, a place where feral camels have thrived for more than a century, growing to such numbers they’ve become a serious environmental problem.
Despite the damage the animals are doing, a hugely successful control program, which has seen 160,000 camels removed from Central Australia over the last three years, will cease to exist at the end of this year because funding by the federal government has been stopped.
It will leave an estimated 300,000 feral camels still destroying fragile native vegetation, eroding inland waterways, competing with livestock and even damaging Aboriginal sacred sites.
The 160,000 camels have been removed from 18 specific ‘‘environmentally important’’ areas of the inland regions — in particular the Simpson Desert and Pilbara.
They’ve been either rounded up for slaughter as food, or culled by gun both from the air and on the ground.
A spokeswoman for the $19 million Australian Feral Camel Management Project said it had been told by the Federal Government the three-year scheme would not be renewed at the end of the year despite coming $4 million under budget.
‘‘ The camels are an extremely serious problem but there are now no future feral
in camel management plans in place,’’ she said.
Aerial surveys this year had revealed there were still an estimated 300,000 camels in Australia’s desert regions.
Jan Ferguson, managing director of Ninti One, a notfor-profit company that tries to build opportunities for peo- ple in remote Australia, and which co- ordinated the AFCMP, said it had established landholder consent across 1.3 million square kilometres for the removal of camels and also forged relationships between landowners and the commercial camel industry.