The Camel: Its Evolution, Ecology, Behavior, and Relationship to Man
by: Hilde Gauthier-Pilters, Anne Innis Dagg

Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 2nd pr., 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages. The camel has stirred the imagination of people from all walks of life. In his Just So Stones, Rudyard Kipling offered a fanciful explanation for the origin of the animal's two most celebrated characteristics, its conspicuous hump and disagreeable temperament. When the world was created, the camel was a lazy animal who avoided his work by living in the middle of an inhospitable desert. While other animals toiled for the benefit of man, the camel remained idle, missing three days of work. A mythical being (the Djinn in Charge of All Deserts) gave the camel a hump with which to store his food. With this self-contained reserve, he could work for three days without eating and thus repay the time that he owed. But, according to Kipling, the camel has "never yet caught up with the three days that he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never yet learned how to behave." In their recent book The Camel, biologists Hilde Gauthier-Pilters and Anne Innis Dagg provide us with a less colorful but decidedly more scientific view of this amazing ungulate. Clean copy.