A Llama? A Camel? It’s Both

One certainly is the loneliest number.

There isn’t a single suitable partner for Rama, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s either too tall and heavy or too short and slight, depending on whom he’s fixed his fancy on.

The problem is, Rama is unique. Really. He is one of a kind, a man-made creature, a beast of burden that doesn’t exist naturally--in fact, would not exist at all if a bunch of scientists hadn’t cooked him up in a laboratory in the desert.

He’s the only male of his species: the cama. Never heard of a cama? Few people have outside this tiny land of sand, sea and oil.

The rulers of Dubai, who used their oil wealth to transform a barren sliver of land in the Persian Gulf into a modern city with lush gardens and trees, also used their money to create Rama, a cross between a camel and a llama.

Actually, Julian Skidmore created Rama. Skidmore, 38, known to everyone as Lulu, is a proper, petite Brit and the principal scientific officer at Dubai’s Camel Reproduction Center.

Her creation, she’s fond of saying, is not as outlandish as, say, crossing an elephant and a giraffe. After all, the camel and the llama hail from the same family tree and were one species millions of years ago.

“In theory you end up with an animal that is halfway in height between the two with a good winter coat,” Skidmore says. “That would be very good.”

That, at least, is the theory, which we’ll get back to later.

Skidmore and her team, under the patronage of the crown prince of Dubai, tried for about a year to breed the two creatures but had difficulty until one magical day in January 1998. That’s when Rama the cama entered the world at a cuddly 12 pounds.

Today, Rama looks like a llama bulked up on steroids. His legs are longer and thicker than a llama’s, but he doesn’t have the hump of a camel. With her cultured British accent and deadpan delivery, Skidmore describes Rama’s romance problems this way:

“Rama is too big for these llamas--he squashes them. And he is too small for the camels,” she says. To help cheer him up a bit, they made him a life-size love toy, though he wasn’t too happy with that, either: “We built him a dummy and he doesn’t like that. He took a bite out of it.”

This next part may sound a bit like the old Frankenstein movie, where the doctor’s monstrous creation wanted someone to love, so they built him a bride. In February, another 12-pound little miracle, Kamilah, was born, and now Rama is waiting in his air-conditioned pen for this cama tot to come of age in a few years.

“That’s my baby,” Skidmore says with a hint of a laugh as she points out the doe-eyed bride-to-be.

At this point, you might be wondering why Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the crown prince of Dubai and the defense minister for the United Arab Emirates, invested all this time and money (though they aren’t saying exactly how much) on breeding camas. What exactly is the point?

Good question, but we’ll get back to that too. First, a bit about camels, the extraordinary animals that have been inseparable from Bedouin culture for centuries. Known by some as Ata Allah (“God’s gift”), they’re so exalted in this community that they are even mentioned in the Koran and serve as emotional markers for a traditional way of life that has largely faded into modernity.

Bedouins “have a very long association with camels and a very special relationship,” says Ahsan ul Haq, a camel veterinarian for the royal family of Dubai. “People here get more concerned when their camel gets sick than a son or daughter.”

We are, of course, talking about the dromedary, or one-hump camel, which is unique to North Africa, the Persian Gulf and West Asia. The two-humped cousin, the Bactrian, can be found chiefly in Mongolia and China

Bedouins have long prized their soft-footed friends for their endurance, but also for their milk, their fur and their meat.

Though they have largely been replaced by jeeps and trucks and other modern forms of transportation, camels--one hump or two--are incredible creatures.

To begin with, there is the hump. You may think it’s a big water tank. No--it’s a store of fat that allows the animal to go for a long time without water or food.

Still, that’s nothing in the camel’s bag of tricks. Camels have a unique internal thermostat that allows their body temperature to fluctuate by only a few degrees, preventing them from overheating in the sun or getting cold at night. They have double layers of eyelashes and a nose that shuts tight, all to keep out the sand.

Still, none of this answers the question “Why?” To get closer to that, let’s talk about another camel attribute: They can run. Not as fast as horses, but fast enough to race.

Camel racing is a big deal in much of the gulf. Gambling is strictly prohibited by Islam, but the sport is a hugely popular pastime and a big industry. A top racing camel can sell for as much as $1.5 million. Victory purses can range from a few hundred dollars to a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.

“Here, it’s a big hobby,” Haq says. “It is also a cultural link between the rulers and the local population. Local people often train the camels for the sheiks.”

In the mid-1980s, the crown prince of Dubai figured why not employ some of the advanced scientific techniques used in thoroughbred breeding for camels? Camels may have a lot of advantageous attributes, but they also have a few peculiarities that make it inconvenient to breed them for racing.

Females, for example, make the best racers, but they are in their racing prime and breeding prime at about the same time. Gestation is 13 months, and females can’t run when they’re pregnant.

So the crown prince turned to Newmarket, England, the center of thoroughbred reproductive sciences in Britain, and its director, W.R. Allen, a leading professor of equine reproduction at Cambridge University. The initial goal was embryo transfer--setting up a system in which a fast-running female could be chemically coaxed into producing many eggs at once. The eggs would then be fertilized, removed from the mother and placed into surrogates.

The mom could still run while, say, her 20 or so offspring came to term in stand-in moms. (Skidmore says her record has been 20 fertilized eggs from one female.)

Skidmore--who at the time worked for Allen, known as Twink--and her supervisors at the Equine Fertility Project in Newmarket were invited to start the “embryo transfer project” in Dubai in 1989.

Skidmore eventually got her doctorate and a high-tech lab in the desert. With her administrative supervisor, Ahmed Mustansir Billah, Skidmore and her team set about making advances in camel reproduction science.

Skidmore recounts her decision to work with camels as she drives her Land Cruiser away from the modern glass-and-metal buildings of Dubai. After leaving the pavement and heading down a sand path, she arrives at the lab, with its two squat white buildings and three fenced pens.

She steps inside the sparsely furnished facility, pulls on a pair of camel-colored coveralls and asks her assistant, Egaz, to bring in 1965, a rather large female camel.

Skidmore had assisted in getting 1965 pregnant and wants to see how the fetus is doing. Arabian racing camels look sort of like huge greyhounds, with small tummies, a rounded chest and long, muscular legs. Egaz brings 1965 in through the barn-like doors and coaxes her down to the ground. As the beast munches away on a bowl of camel cereal, Skidmore plunges her gloved arm elbow-deep inside the camel to take an ultrasound.

“That’s the heart,” Skidmore says, pointing proudly toward a small, flickering image on a video monitor. The camel doesn’t seem to mind one bit, and as Skidmore pulls her arm out, she says, “Let’s go see Kamilah.”

Which brings us, again, to “Why?”

Llamas and camels split tens of millions of years ago, with the former adapting to life in the New World, where they lived at higher altitudes. The latter became suited to the desert. Why reunite them?

To paraphrase “The Six Million Dollar Man,” the TV show from the ‘70s: “We can build him. We have the technology.” Once immersed in the world of camel reproduction, Skidmore and her team dreamed up a new project: They wanted to make a better animal. Perhaps more important, they wanted to try something no one had done before.

The idea, Skidmore says, was to do more than create a curiosity. Back in 1971, for example, Britain’s Colchester Zoo put some donkeys and zebras together in a pen and by chance ended up with zeedonks, a donkey-looking animal with black-and-white-striped legs. They attracted lots of visitors, but that was about all.

Skidmore and her team had grander hopes for the cama, envisioning something as useful as a mule, which is a cross between a horse and a donkey. (No one knows yet if Rama shares a mule attribute: sterility.) The goal was to achieve the best of both animals and end up with something less ornery than a camel but bigger than a llama--and with the prized llama fur. A beast of burden with a nice personality and good hair.

Rama didn’t exactly work out that way. He never got as big as hoped, and though his coat is furrier than a camel’s, it’s not nearly as luxurious as a llama’s. And he’s very, very difficult to deal with, charging at people, biting, refusing to stand still even to have ticks pulled off.

These days, he spends his mornings isolated from the other animals in an outdoor pen at the reproductive center compound. He escapes the midday heat in an air-conditioned enclosure, where he munches on dried greens.

At least a few people think the whole thing is a bit strange, even wrong.

“I think it’s totally useless,” says Ilse Kohler-Rollefson, a veterinarian and anthropologist. “These animals will be like freaks. They will not feel they belong in Arabia or South America.”

Skidmore acknowledges her progeny’s behavioral problems but, like many first-time mothers, blames herself, not the tyke. She says she never should have bottle-fed him but should have let him nurse from his llama mom.

Still, she and her team wanted to see if they could do it again, maybe with a better result. Enter Kamilah. Right now she is adorable, with big brown eyes, a brown coat, a white crown on her head and white nose. As with most second children, she’s not getting the attention of the first.

But physically it doesn’t look like the world’s second cama will be substantially different from the first. And Kamilah doesn’t seem to be any more comfortable with people than her prospective partner is.

Skidmore knows that her cama-creating days may be numbered. “We’ll produce a few, then obviously we’ll probably say, ‘That’s enough,’ ” she says.

For Rama, though, at least there is Kamilah, who should soon bring an end to his lonely days and, perhaps, improve his personality.

“He doesn’t have a social association with anything,” Haq says. “If you have a companion, you are calmer and more happy. That might be the reason he is nasty.”