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What do you get when a llama and a camel mate?
©Los Angeles Times DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- 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 too tall and heavy or too short and slight, depending on whom he's fixed his fancy on. The problem is, Rama is unique. He is one of a kind, a man-made creature, a beast of burden that doesn't exist naturally and would not exist 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." Skidmore and her team, under the patronage of the crown price 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 might 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 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 how much) on breeding camas. What exactly is the point? Good question, but 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 mentioned in the Koran and serve as emotional markers for a traditional way of life that has largely faded into modernity. "They 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." Still, 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. A top racing camel can sell for as much as $1.5-million. Victory purses can range from a few hundred dollars to a 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 might 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 the same time (or even just one) and then have those eggs fertilized, removed from the mother and placed into surrogates. The mom could 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. Which she achieved. Which brings us, again, to why the cama? To borrow from The Six Million Dollar Man 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, the Colchester Zoo in England 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 perhaps something as useful as a mule, a cross between a horse and a donkey, only stronger. (No one knows if cama shares one mule attribute: sterility.) The goal was to achieve the best attributes of both and end up with an animal less ornery than a camel but bigger than a llama -- and with valued llama fur. A beast of burden with a personality and good hair. Rama didn't exactly work out that way. He never got as big as they had hoped, and while his coat is furrier than a camel, 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. 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 feed 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. Skidmore knows that her cama-creating days might 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."
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