Camel Meatloaf

The first camel I ever saw up close was in my backyard.  It was in my backyard every day around 4 PM, grazing.

The camel had an attendant, who always greeted me as if it was OK for the camel to be in my yard.  I eventually found out that it was the sultan's camel.  Yes, it was OK for the royal camel to graze in my backyard.  

The royal camel was regal: tall with fur a uniform color, a paler version of the camelhair coats I used to see for sale in department stores back in the United States.

In Kano, Nigeria, camels were a fairly frequent sight.  They were used as beasts of burden - carrying goods or carrying people.  (The sultan's camel, however, was for ceremonial purposes.)

Then I found out that camels were edible.

An American told me that camel meat was sold in the Kano market.  Being an American, of course, he had to tell me which part of a camel is best for making hamburgers: the hump.

Isn't a camel's hump full of water?  No, that idea was from some childhood fairy tale.  A camel's hump is full of fat, which makes it ideal for grinding into hamburgers - or meatloaf.  Camel meatloaf - food for a special occasion.

Betty Daniels was coming to visit.  She lived in a part of Nigeria that had no camels - and no horses - because it was in the zone where tsetse flies lived.  When tsetse flies bite an animal, they transmit trypanosomes.  Horses and camels are not resistant to trypanosomes; so, they die.

I told my cook that we were having a dinner guest, and would he please go to the Kano market, buy some meat from the hump of a camel, and make camel meatloaf.  When Betty arrived at my house, I told her, "Betty, we are having meatloaf for dinner".  I planned to wait until she had eaten half her dinner and spring the news on her: it was camel meatloaf.  I was eager to see whether Betty would be horrified or fascinated.

The moment came, Betty was halfway through dinner, and I told her she was eating meatloaf made from the hump of a camel.  Her reaction: "Oh” and she kept on eating.  No horror, no fascination, just a plain "Oh", as if there was nothing remarkable about eating camel hump.

The abattoir, where all the meat for the Kano market is slaughtered, sits on the outskirts of the city.  I went out to take a look at it, and I observed the animals tethered outside, awaiting their destiny on the inside of the abattoir.  There were cows and there were camels.  The camels looked especially scraggly and worn down; I realized that these camels were no longer able to function as beasts of burden.  The abattoir was the end of the line for them.

After seeing these decrepid animals, I never ate camel meat again.  And the camels thanked me by putting on a special show one day.

It was the day I was taking some Swedish friends to the Kano Airport, to catch a jet plane back to Sweden.  But traffic on the airport road had to stop: there was a camel caravan crossing the road.  Camel after camel trudged past us, taking their own sweet time.

I savored the irony that my Swedish friends' trip to the airport to catch a twentieth-century mode of transportation had been slowed down by an ancient form of transportation.

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If you would like to know how to train a pet camel, here is a 12-minute video from Arizona:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvkoloNYZE4

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com