A Little Something About Camels

Camels are really cool. They have that something. I don't know what it is. They just have it, and I like 'em.

First of all, for those of you who have retained none of the knowledge you learned in science class, there is a great big scientific classification system for every fucking living thing. Trees, bees, and sperm. Maybe, I don't know about spermy wermies.

It goes a-like this: Kingdom>Phylum>Class>Order>Family>Genus. I'm not going to get too complicated, so I'm just going to state that camels are part of the Camelidae Family.

There are only 6 types in the Camelidae family. 4 llamas and 2 camels. And to go one level deeper, camels are in the Genus of Camelus. This great big scientific classification system is massively deep, and gets very goes from the extremely general (Mammals for instance) to the very specific (the two types of camels at the absolute bottom level).

I must make a very important distinction. You may be saying: "Dromedary? Bactrian? Eh?". I was saying that until I did lots and lots of research to do my fascination with these animals. Basically, bactrian means 2 humps and dromedary means 1 hump. Get it? Of course.

Us humans first domesticated camels thousands of years ago. Back in that day, they were most common in the northern Africa and western Asia. They didn't have horses over there, so camels were like horses were in our continent.

As of today, there are almost 13 million alive. The species is for all intensive purposes extinct in the wild. Just like horses in North America. Like I said, they're very comparable to horses in terms of their history in the past thousand years. However, there are a shit load of wild camel in central Australia. An estimated 32,000 to be exact. The reason for this is that in the 19th century, a shit load escaped captivity. And then a shit load bred. And that shit load bred. And now there's 32,000 wild there. But 32,000 compared to the 13 million alive is really a small numbers. Strays I suppose.

Bactrian camels are a bit rare now a days. As of today, there is an estimated 1.4 of them, most of them being domesticated. There are about 1000 true wild bactrians in the Gobi Desert, and a small amount living in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and even Russia. I find Russia a bit hard to imagine though. I think Russia, and I think really fucking cold weather, goofy fucking hats, and that bitch from Goldeneye. And the name Boris. Oh yeah, and that evil bitch from Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Now why are camels so god damn cool? They have personality and charisma. 10 times cooler than a horse. Fuck horses. Graceful, pretty little bitches. Fuck 'em. Camels are the rebels. The outcasts of the cheap transportation section of the animal kingdom. Maybe they can't run fast, but they're fucking cool. They just... Got that something.