I'd say that's a exceptionally decent camel at $55k.

Average price is $400. Australia sells camels (I'm assuming wild herds captured) for $1-1.5k per head.

https://www.mla.com.au/research-and-development/search-rd-re...

Is the $400 price when they are sold for meat or hair? Or perhaps as just raw material for a camel training pipeline.

Presumably a camel that anyone wants to ride has been raised and trained properly. That camel is ever going to be ridden, then putting down $400 for a warm body is only the beginning of the investment.

Article says 'world trade in live camels'.

I assume it's mostly meat but have read elsewhere Australia camels are often used for breeding vigour.

On the training. I know more about horses. Where I live in Australia a typical untrained horse will go for about $2-4k and trained it will go from $3k to $10k. Obviously add zeros for special breeds or quality genetics. I cant see camels being too different in ratio of untrained to trained value, even a lower ratio given cheaper labour costs in ME.

The horse market is like the piano market. Exceptional specimens are exceedingly expensive but at the low end you can probably just find one for free that no one wants anymore.

A cursory google search seems to indicate those are prices for racing camels. In that case, not too surprising - one observes similar gaps between race horses and “every day” horses.

I lived with some bedouins in Morocco near merzouga for a few months who had about a hundred camels. I really doubt they were sitting on millions of dollars of camels.

Wait, what? Why?

I met a guy on a bus who was studying English in the city but heading back to his parents to bring veterinary medicine. We hit it off and he invited me back to his family's compound, and it turns out his family was super cool and invited me to stay a couple of days. I kept finding things to do to be helpful, and they were more than willing to keep feeding and housing me. I helped some of the cousins practice English, set up some radios for them, and also worked a bit to get a website up and running for a tourist business they were trying to set up(basically airbnbing their place and showing off traditional bedouin lifestyle).

It’s much easier to get access to the materials for camel production, though.

The high price of those camels is, oddly, tied to oil riches.

Here in the U.S., my friend's perfectly capable trail horse (who also has a variety of other training and has even done a bit of dressage) was around a $1000, a few years ago.

Camels have a reputation (I'm not sure to what extent it's deserved) of being somewhat more obstreperous; nonetheless, I have a hard time extrapolating to 50K, were camels in a like position to horses in the U.S. Not for a "decent" camel.

In current Saudi Arabia, sure, maybe. But current Saudi Arabia is not what's being talked about, as being "down the line".

P.S. Just don't hook my friend's horse up to a cart or sleigh or the like. She was never trained for that, and at this point, she's not having any of it. She also doesn't think much of jumping; smart horse, her joints will last longer.

To whatever distance their relevant relationship to llamas extends, it's deserved.

I don't remember the exact wording, but I've heard and read that alpacas are fairly nice, while llamas will wait to knife you when your back is turned.

I have a friend down under (to the right of Oz) who has the former and has some knowledge of the latter. I seem to recall her confirming this, when I mentioned it.

And many Middle Eastern countries import breeding stock from Australia (which has a massive feral and invasive camel population)

For the clueless like me, is there a joke here?

Only if you pay more than $7,500 for a 2 year-old dromedary bull.