What in hell were those jangling monstrosities; those big, toothy, snooded goats?…Their eyelids are thatched with the loveliest lashes that God ever loomed. They are sturdy from their ears to the soles of their feet. And their great height lays all the horizon to view.
-Inland, Tea Obreht, a novel in part about the US Camel Corps in Arizona, led by chief drover Haji Ali, aka Hi Jolly, an Arab Christian who converted to Islam and took a muslim name in order to make the haj, then immigrated to America and late in life reverted to his birth name Philip Tedro, born in Smyrna to a Greek mother and Syrian father
Hi Jolly was a camel driver a long time ago, followed Mr. Beale [commander of the Camel Corps] a way out west, didn’t mind the burnin’ sand in that God forsakin’ land, but he didn’t mind the pretty gals the best.
-Hi Jolly, folk song recorded by the New Christy Minstrels
The drovers found it extraordinarily laughable that camels were kept in American zoos. They knew all about a zoo, the jeneinat al-hayawanaat, garden of animals, the Arabic for garden being the diminutive form of the word paradise. A little paradise of animals.
The drovers thought that lions and elephants and giraffes belonged in the zoo, not cows or goats or chickens….or camels. I tried to explain that camels were so unusual in America that people would pay to see them behind a fence, next to the elephants. I told them about petting zoos, where city kids could pet farm animals. That made them laugh too.
Camels living outside their home territory fascinated the drovers. I told them about Australia’s feral camels, they said they would go there to herd them. I told them about the US Camel Corps, and how when it was disbanded the camels were released into the wild. They said, why did they give away valuable livestock? America must be so rich that it doesn’t matter to waste, they thought.