Distribution and Numbers
The 14 million dromedaries alive today are domesticated animals (mostly living in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Maghreb, Middle East and South Asia). The Horn region alone has the largest concentration of camels in the world, where the dromedaries constitute an important part of local nomadic life. They provide peripatetic Somali and Ethiopian people with milk, food and transportation.
The Bactrian camel is now reduced to an estimated 1.4 million animals, mostly domesticated. About 1,000 wild Bactrian camels are thought to inhabit the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia.
The substantial feral population of dromedary camels is estimated at up to 1,000,000 in central parts of Australia, descended from individuals introduced as a method of transport in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This population is growing about 8% per year. Representatives of the Australian government have culled more than 100,000 of the animals in part because the camels use too much of the limited resources needed by sheep farmers.
A small population of introduced camels, dromedaries and Bactrians, survived in the Southwest United States until the second half of the 20th century. These animals, imported from Turkey, were part of the U.S. Camel Corps experiment and used as draft animals in mines and escaped or were released after the project was terminated. Twenty-three Bactrian camels were brought to Canada during the Cariboo Gold Rush.
Read more about this topic: Camel
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