The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  It was a major stroke of luck that not only were the calves born healthy but that four of the six were female, since females are superior when it comes to speed. If we’d had five males and one female, there’s no doubt it would have made it harder to convince the locals of the value of our work.

  In scientific terms, so much was unique in what we had done. We had broken new ground every step of the way and done it without the benefit of a body of science to guide us. We would learn more later. For one thing, the camel is different to most other animals because the very act of mating helps stimulate the release of an egg. This means that simply fertilising an egg through artificial insemination won’t give the best result.

  We celebrated the moment very well that night at the hotel, but in truth the magnitude of what we had achieved only really hit home when I later saw coverage of it on the front page of The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Such was the reluctance of the Crown Prince’s men to publicise the achievement that the story only saw the light of day two and a half years after the event and was written up as a feel-good Christmas piece.

  Riding the local angle for all it was worth, the paper carried a report headlined ‘Australian vets perfect world’s first camel embryo transfer’. The first paragraph said: ‘Take three wise men, a desert landscape and a camel named Sumha and you have a science Christmas story.’ Two of the ‘three wise men’ were Dr Angus McKinnon of the University of Melbourne and myself; the third was the Crown Prince. It was an amusing mash-up of the Christian birth story in Bethlehem, which happened to be thousands of kilometres away. The Muslim Crown Prince might also have been somewhat bemused to find himself lumped in with a Christian trio. Nevertheless, it captured the idea of a miracle birth, even if science was the father.

  It was only then, seeing it in print, that I fully comprehended how big the achievement was. Our world first was really something extraordinary, not just for the camel world but for veterinary science.

  We were finally on our way to making the Crown Prince’s camels the best in the Gulf and, though there was still a way to go, we now had a tool in our armoury that left our opponents flat-footed.

  Mr Zuhair was well pleased. He had informed the Crown Prince and His Highness was delighted. It meant enormous kudos not just for the centre built in his name but also for his father, the president, and for the emirate of Abu Dhabi. It justified the investment he’d put into getting western experts like us over to Al Ain to set up the centre as a truly pioneering institution.

  On the strength of the breakthrough, Sheikh Khalifa ordered that a further ten million dollars be spent on establishing a special centre for researching reproductive physiology and breeding superior racing camels. Our small research centre was now to be transformed into a major new Gulf institution, which became known as the Hilli Embryo Transfer Centre for Racing Camels.

  This, too, was all top-secret. The centre needed to be constructed somewhere remote. A site had been found in the area of Hilli a few kilometres north of Al Ain, hidden behind sand dunes and accessible only by a compacted-sand track. Security barriers would be erected to stop any unauthorised access.

  The aim was to make the Hilli centre a veritable breeding factory for racing camels. Retired racing camels with superior pedigree and performance would be identified and sent there for breeding, using embryo transfer technology. The complex would include a huge new lab, with advanced reproductive equipment sourced from all over the world. There would be an indoor handling facility, which would allow us to keep the camel immobile while we conducted ultrasonic examinations and collected and transferred embryos. The staff would swell from ten to thirty or more, including camel handlers. With air-conditioning it would be possible to work through the heat of the summer months and keep research projects on the go all year round. This would add another five months and effectively double the time we had at our disposal to produce more embryo camels.

  We’d had a fifty per cent success rate for our first attempt with the Crown Prince’s racing camels, so we knew there was scope to improve our techniques further. Immediately we would be able to refine our methods and push up pregnancy rates to make them comparable with other domestic species, where the success rate was as high as sixty-five to seventy per cent.

  As good as it was, embryo transfer was just the tip of the iceberg. Now that we had established that you could produce multiple embryos from a camel, all other reproductive techniques were open to us. Our next aim was to produce camel calves from frozen embryos. This would allow us to freeze any embryos we were unable to transfer immediately, giving us much greater flexibility. And there were other techniques to be explored, such as semen freezing, artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilisation. Each and every one of these would give us another way to maximise the genes of our best camels.

  Yet with all our progress, we were still walking on eggshells, pardon the pun. Not everyone was pleased with the progress we had made. In bringing the latest fruits of modern science to bear, we were tampering with an animal that is the symbol of ancient Arabia. Here, literally, was the collision point of science, culture and faith. The developments posed a further threat to some of the established trainers, many of whom were already leery of even conventional procedures such as injections. They feared that our breeding techniques would essentially make them redundant. After all, who needs a trainer to work their secret magic when you have genetically superior camels being turned out of a lab?

  It was no small concern. There are vast amounts of money washing around the camel races, and trainers are the chief beneficiaries. Indeed, the best of the trainers might earn well over a million dollars a year from their share of the prize money given at the huge number of races that are held, with cash prizes all the way down to tenth place. The trainers, in turn, would use these funds to provide for their families and some of their tribe. Thus the trainers played a key role in an informal social security and reward system that redistributed petro-dollars and contributed enormously to the stability of their society.

  So the revolutionary techniques we introduced had the potential to become a serious social issue, well beyond just making a faster camel. Eventually this, more than any other factor, would work against us.

  You might imagine that there would have been a huge hullaballoo surrounding the birth of Sumha’s Girl. But there wasn’t. She was certainly an instant celebrity for the select few who witnessed her first steps that day. However, as significant as our achievement was, we were under orders not to disclose details of the science that lay behind it. The technology we used was a secret, and in the arms race to develop the fastest camels, we were in the equivalent of Los Alamos.

  Heath Harris would have a bit of fun with all the secrecy. When visitors were due from Dubai, he would leave out files marked ‘Top-secret: The Speed Gene’ for a bit of a lark. Who knows what tall tales returned about what was really going on in Al Ain.

  It was a year after the birth before we were permitted to present our work publicly for the first time. This was to a scientific gathering at the world’s first camel conference, held in Dubai.

  Like all things Dubai, this was a grand and sumptuous occasion, bringing together the best of international knowledge. There were experts from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and North Africa. Most were very well known for their work with horses, which they had adapted to camels. Nearly all of them worked for the various Gulf royal families trying to make their camels the best.

  The most advanced research work up to this point had been done in Dubai. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum had assembled a formidable research team headed by fertility experts and microbiologists drawn from the Newmarket stables in the United Kingdom, generally considered to be the global centre of thoroughbred horseracing. It was also the UK headquarters for training Sheikh Mohammed’s horses.

  The leading light from Newmarket was Professor William ‘Twink’ Allen, who was renowned in the horse world for his work running the equine fertility unit at
Robinson College in Cambridge and then Newmarket. Twink’s daughter ultimately married Sheikh Mohammed’s chief jockey, Frankie Dettori. Both Twink and English scientist Lulu Skidmore had been recruited to work with Sheikh Mohammed’s racing camels.

  The contest between Dubai and Abu Dhabi was therefore very much England versus Australia, with Angus McKinnon, Doug Cluer and I working for Abu Dhabi.

  At the camel conference, the Dubai team gave an impressive presentation on their research on superovulation, showing how they were able to detect follicles in the uterus at various stages of development. If Dubai was superovulating camels then clearly, for all our secrecy, word had leaked out beyond our little group that we had been working on embryo transfer. Either that or Dubai’s experts had independently taken the same approach as Heath had: give it a go and see what happens.

  When it came to our turn, we were able to report the results of 121 embryo transfers leading to thirty-five pregnancies. We had already produced results while Dubai was still in the research stage. I was also able to present a paper on the pioneering use of ultrasound to monitor the reproductive cycle of the camel. It was apparent that we had been more practical in our work and that we saw the bigger picture of where all this could go.

  We were one up on our rivals that day. But in the battle unfolding for camel supremacy, the Abu Dhabi–Australia team still had a long way to go.

  Eleven

  When Katya met Khaled

  The early success of the embryo transfer program banished any thoughts of us being packed off back to Australia.

  Along the way I learned a valuable lesson. The sheikhs who run the country certainly want to see results for their money, but at the same time they were capable of being far more tolerant of failure than people in western society. They took the view that, no matter how much you planned for things to happen, in the end whatever comes to pass is God’s will.

  This belief permeates every aspect of life and in some ways it makes for a far more relaxed approach to getting things done. Why sweat it if it’s beyond your control? It’s a liberating thought if you can embrace it, and a helpful attitude in a country that in so many ways was a giant start-up. Some things work, some things don’t. If you set off with a fear of failure, you get nowhere.

  I liked that spirit and I liked the place; it gave me a sense of freedom that I could never feel in Australia. Bit by bit, we had put down roots. Al Ain felt like home. Subconsciously, I might even have begun to feel that it was a place I might never leave.

  After five years, I was the only one left standing from the original gang that had come over to set up the camel centre. Geoff Manefield had been the first to depart, followed by Heath, who returned full-time to training horses. Everyone wanted Heath for his ability to make a horse do whatever needed to be done; if you wanted a horse to dance a jig, Heath was your man. He had no shortage of offers to work on major movies and television series all over the world. Doug Cluer was the last to call it quits. He and his family had headed back to Tweed Heads to pick up where they’d left off.

  Even Mr Zuhair was leaving the project. It was really sad to lose him, but he was replaced by a member of the royal family who was very hands-on with the camels and wanted to drive our work forward. Sheikh Sultan was a cousin of the Crown Prince and also a personal adviser to him. He was a good judge of a camel and became very involved in deciding what animals we would buy.

  This kind of turnover is par for the course in the UAE. The average lifecycle for an expat was, and remains, three to four years. For most people that’s enough time on a generous tax-free salary and good working conditions to give them a pot of money to get on with. Mostly they want to get back home for the sake of their kids’ education or to give them a sense of home.

  For my part, though, I had no desire to go anywhere. The longer I stayed, the more I liked it. Patti was never one to turn her back on adventure either.

  There are expats who just can’t take the way of living and working in the UAE. It’s a place where things don’t always go according to plan. Projects can be delayed for no clear reason, or change course abruptly. Things don’t always function like clockwork, as they might back home.

  But for me, that’s what made it so good. There were echoes of my early days back at the Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari Park, a large element of chaos that I loved. Is there anything more dull than predictability?

  I realised early on that language was going to be key to both my long-term survival and ultimate success. I was dealing day-to-day with Emiratis and other Gulf Arabs who were born and raised in the desert. They were men who knew the business of camels and survival and who might barely have seen the inside of a classroom. So I set about acquiring their language, which is a particular form of Arabic, different to the standard Arabic that prevails across the Middle East. You won’t find it in a textbook. The only way you can learn it is by constant interaction. The more I was able to converse with the Bedouin trainers, the more we understood what each of us had to offer and the more our respect for each other grew.

  This was another universe, entirely different to what most western expats experience. English alone is fine if you are working in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And, given that it is the international language of business, most younger Emiratis are being educated in English. Many are sent to schools in the UK or the USA, specifically to help them become fluent and able to negotiate with international partners. Al Ain was more traditional and conservative.

  With us staying on, our daughters Katya and Erica were also saying goodbye to other expat kids and, in turn, making more and more friendships with the local kids. And that’s how it all began for Katya and an Emirati boy called Khaled.

  The international school that Katya went to was a melting pot for dozens of different cultures. There were the kids of American expats, British expats, Indian expats and Lebanese expats. There was even the hard-case son of a reputed Palestinian political heavyweight who’d been temporarily banished from Gaza, or so the gossip had it. Some Emirati families also sent their kids there to be educated in English.

  Out of this mix, Katya and Khaled were drawn to each other. Katya was fourteen and Khaled fifteen when their mutual crush developed.

  Khaled was a great kid. Early on he turned up to our house with a snake that needed help, so he was immediately in my good books. Khaled had picked up a saw-scaled viper, which is not one of the deadliest snakes in the world but it still kills more people than just about every other snake.

  These little vipers are all through North Africa and the Middle East. Normally they will sit in the sand and mind their own business—unless you happen to stand next to one, and then it will bite you. More often than not, this will happen to people in the middle of nowhere and they die simply because they can’t get treatment.

  There was a local custom where the boys would go into the desert and catch one of these saw-scaled vipers, stitch its mouth together with cotton thread and keep it in their pocket. Then, for a laugh, they would throw the viper at people and scare the shit out of them.

  Khaled didn’t want to play that game. He had rescued one of these poor creatures and brought it to me to remove the thread from its mouth, which I did very carefully, using a fine scalpel. It was then ready to be returned to the wild. Needless to say, Khaled won a lot of points with me for that.

  It was only later on that Patti and I learned that Katya and Khaled had got themselves into trouble for holding hands at school. This might sound like the sort of low-level, innocent stuff that teenagers do but, even at this early stage, Katya and Khaled were breaking one of the unwritten rules which govern relations between expats and their Emirati hosts: by all means be good mates, but no more.

  Actually it was a huge red line they were crossing, because Katya and Khaled were seeing each other outside of school as well. Khaled would turn up at odd hours and knock on the door to say hello to Katya, or he’d be over to watch Katya working with her horse.

  For the first year or two w
e knew Katya and Khaled were keen on each other, but after a while we became concerned that this might be getting a little more serious than we had counted on. It was a dilemma that most western families in the UAE don’t need to confront, simply because they live in isolation from the Emiratis. If we were crossing a threshold, we didn’t know what the implications could be.

  I had no problem in principle with Katya being keen on a local. In some ways it showed her willingness to be open to other influences, a trait Katya had seen at home and which had been instilled in me by my dad. On another level, though, it just didn’t seem wise for Katya to become involved with someone and then have to leave; we didn’t have any plans to go, but you never knew. The last thing we needed was any sort of trouble with a local family. And this wasn’t just any family.

  Khaled’s family, the Mazroueis, are desert people through and through and have played a prominent part in the UAE’s history. The Mazroueis have close ties with the Al Nahyan family that rules Abu Dhabi and the UAE. Khaled’s grandfather is a revered figure in local lore: the UAE president called him the ‘Emir’, an affectionate term loosely meaning ‘he who must be obeyed’.

  It is a measure of the family’s standing that a Mazrouei woman is married to my ultimate boss, Sheikh Khalifa, then the Crown Prince and now President of the United Arab Emirates. In the natural course of events, the Mazroueis might expect that Khaled too might marry into the ruling family. At the very least he would marry into another leading local family or tribe.

  We knew this was going to be difficult to navigate. There were a host of cultural issues to take into account. In short, a Mazrouei being with a western girl could get complicated. I sought the counsel of an old Emirati friend, Mohammed Al Dhaheri, on the best way to navigate this minefield. Mohammed was of the view that a meeting needed to be brokered between the families to gently tease out the awkward situation. His advice was that this would be best handled by the mothers, who arranged to meet.