Cloning is in high demand in the competitive world of camel beauty pageants, leaving scientists at a Dubai clinic working round the clock to produce carbon-copy beasts. Not every animal is blessed with sought-after drooping lips and a tall, elegant neck, but technology now allows wealthy clients to replace their most beautiful camel with one just like it.
At the Reproductive Biotechnology Center, with views of the UAE city’s towering skyscrapers, scientists pore over microscopes while dozens of cloned camels roam outside. “We have so much demand for cloning camels that we are not able to keep up”, the center’s scientific director Nisar Wani told AFP.
Beauty pageants are not the only driver of the camel cloning industry. Many customers want to reproduce racing camels, or animals that produce large amounts of milk. But “beauty queens” are the most popular order. Gulf clients will pay between 200,000 and 400,000 dirham ($54,500–$109,000) to duplicate a dromedary.
…12 years ago, Dubai claimed the world’s first cloned camel. Injaz, a female whose name means achievement in Arabic, was born on April 8, 2009, after more than 5 years of work by Wani and others.
From the minute Injaz was born, there was no going back. “We are now producing plenty, maybe more than 10 to 20 babies every year. This year we have 28 pregnancies (so far), last year we had 20”, Wani said with pride. The center is churning out “racing champions, high milk-producing animals… and winners of beauty contests called Beauty Queens”, added Wani, sitting in a lab next to the preserved body of a cloned camel in a glass container.
…“We have cloned some she-camels that produce more than 35 liters of milk a day”, said Wani, compared to an average of 5 liters in normal camels.
…“In this process which we call multiple ovulation and embryo transfer, we super-stimulate the champion females and breed them with champion males”, explained Wani.