Camel: A Fast Declining Animal Species but Can Strive with its Unique Climate Resilience and ‘Desert to Medicine’ Application

Abstract

Camels serve as multipurpose animals providing milk by the females, used for transport or draught usually by the males, yield fiber/ hair from both the sexes and finally providing meat as the animals culled from any production purposes. Modern-day camel regain its importance through its ability to produce quality meat, milk, and fiber and recognizing ‘Camel Diary’ as a means of opportunity for the urban farmers and ‘Job-creation’ for the entrepreneurs. The two most-promising climate resilient species thrive well in hot arid and semi-arid regions of the desert (e.g. Camelus dromedaries) and arid cold-climatic regions of the mountains (e.g. C. bactrianus) and continue to provide livelihood opportunity to co-habiting human population. This review is an attempt to focus on sustenance of this livestock, which has faced a rapid decline in some of the regions of the world including India due to overtaking of its principal transportation services by rapid mechanization. Nevertheless, camel’s unique ability to adapt to extreme desert ecosystem with peculiar physiological (thermoregulation, water metabolism, glucose and energy metabolism, salt tolerance, forbearance against choking dust, etc.) and anatomical (fore limb and hind limb, long neck, single and double hump, third eye-lid, forestomach, etc.) differences has a significant bearing on its productive lifespan. The recognition and contribution of single-humped camel as ‘Dairy Animal’ has many encouraging prospects as its milk, meat and products have functional, nutraceutical and therapeutic value besides contributing to human protein nutrition. There is multiple potential role of camel milk bioactive peptides to demonstrate as antimicrobial, antiviral, immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative and anti-hypertensive activities. Thus, the camel milk, meat and their products can be grouped under agricultural trade for international market. This era of importance would certainly draw renewed focus in developing camel as sustainable dairy animal that can fetch additional price and augment the income of the farmers.