The Smelly Truth: Why Camels Failed In Texas Military Operations
El Paso, TX might be a desert but not all deserts are the same, for instance, we don't have any camels here. Hollywood taught me that camels were just natural to any desert but you never see them here unless its in a zoo.
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Texas ALMOST Had Camels Though.
I know what you're thinking, how does a state 'almost' have camels. Well in 1856, Jefferson Davis was still the Secretary of War for the US and had yet to defect and become President of the Confederacy.
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During the American Indian wars, Jefferson thought the best way to fight against native forces in desert regions here in the US was to trade out horses for, you guessed it, camels.
The Camel Experiment
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The Navy loaded up one of its store ships and sailed to North Africa! The ship left Africa with 33 camels and returned home with the 34 camels (there was a camel birth during the trip).
A team in Camp Verde, Texas was tasked with running experiments to see what the camels could do. The point was to make sure the camels could move fast enough, carry heavy loads, or what other utilities they could get out of them.
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The Results Were...Kinda Hilarious.
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Well the US military at the time wasn't equipped to train camels. The official report was that the camels were smelly, obnoxious, and hard to control. Some camels even escaped like the fuzzy lil rebels they are.
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They roamed the desert for a few years and became part of the folklore in different parts of Texas and New Mexico.
Imagine El Paso With Camels
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This is a pretty silly story but honestly stuff like this is how different animals get introduced into places they're not natural to. If The Camel Experiment had worked, we would have way more stories of our ancestors in Mexico and Texas just going wild riding around on a bunch of camels and I personally feel robbed.
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Oh well. What do you think, would this have been awesome or really dumb?
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