2023-07-29 00:39:25
The video of infamy The Franz Weber Foundation denounces Hyperviolence in Gran Canaria A study of pre-Hispanic brutality
How many houses in Spain will have a photograph in which the children of the family, perhaps now adults, appear mounted on a camel with the dunes of Maspalomas or the black landscape of Timanfaya in the background? How many houses in Germany, the Netherlands or the UK will keep the same souvenir? For the last 50 years, Canarian camels (actually, they are dromedaries, but on the islands they never received any other name than camel) have been an icon of tourism in Spain, an almost universal and unmistakable image. His future, on the other hand, is uncertain. Animal associations such as the Franz Weber Foundation have denounced the recreational exploitation of camels, taking advantage of the recent dissemination of a video in which a calf tried several times and without success to stand up with the load of two men on top, without the passengers or breeders understanding that the animal was suffering.
“I see these things with despair“, replies Paco Jiménez, the largest camel businessman on the islands and the only one who is dedicated to his breeding with scale and professional methods. “With desperation and boredom for having to be on the defensive. I don’t know how many days four of us wake up at four in the morning to take care of a sick camel. But of that work there is no video posted. It seems to me that this is a strictly ideological discussion in which much knowledge is lacking.”
What kind of knowledge? Jiménez begins by explaining that camel breeding has already changed a lot and has adapted to the moral and environmental demands of the contemporary world. “The camels of 40 years ago were used to carrying much more weight than they carry today. The same thing happened with horses, which used to ride a hundred and odd kilometers in a day. That, today, is imaginable.” And as for the environment, Jiménez says that his tourist exploitation operates in Maspalomas, in the south of Gran Canaria and that it has scrupulously adapted to the conservation regulations of the Dunes, a fragile and protected space by law.
The rancher also remembers the weight of the camel in the history of the archipelago. Where did these Canarian camels come from? Why did they take root on the islands? José M. Martín, a historian from Granada, researched his story for a paper published by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. “The origin is in 1569, in the expedition of Agustín Herrera, lord of Fuerteventura, to the Barbary”, the historian explains to Papel. A bit of context: in the first years of the European colonization of the Canary Islands, the Kingdom of Castile did not rule directly in Fuerteventura or Lanzarote. The easternmost islands of the Canary Islands were manors, something like franchises from the metropolis whose owners had to make a living to start the local economy. Herrera, later the Marquis of Fuerteventura, was actually a businessman who on a couple of occasions he traveled to the African coast to capture (or rather capture) settlers for his island. In one of those incursions, Herrera also brought a handful of camels to boost agricultural production, more as an experiment than anything else. “Until then, the camel was an animal more legendary than real in European culture,” says José M. Martín.
The import was an indisputable success: for the next 400 years, camels they plowed and plowed the fields, loaded with passengers and goods, they fed the canaries with meat and milk, they gave them grease for their candles and their healing ointments and they even had a military use in defending against attacks by Dutch and English pirates. They also ate little and drank almost nothing, as their fame says, and thus they adapted to the barren land from Lanzarote and Fuerteventura and, to a lesser extent, to Gran Canaria and Tenerife. “The original African dromedary evolved and became the Canary camel, which is already another species. Shorter, with stronger legs, less fast but more resistant and capable of climbing, which was what was needed on the islands,” says José M. Martin.
There are 19th century censuses that speak of 4,200 heads in Fuerteventura and 2,500 in Lanzarote. Miguel de Unamuno wrote sonnets for them during his Majorero exile and he described his character in a few pages (in short, his temperament is acceptable except during periods of heat). And there were exports of Canarian camels to Peru and New Zealand.
And then everything changed. Agriculture became mechanized and lost weight in the Canarian economy, first to the benefit of fishing, then trade and, finally, tourism. And, when tourism arrived, the Canarian camel found his second job, the one we have all known: the attraction for vacationers.
“I started with camels by chance, because, in reality, my vocation was to dedicate myself to horses,” says Paco Jiménez. In the 70s, tourism took off from his island, Gran Canaria, and the market offered for a young man like him, obsessed with horses, very picturesque works. “I worked in Sioux City, a cowboy town, a setting that mimicked Westerns as a tourist attraction. Let’s say I was doing the work of a stuntman… Only I thought I was John Wayne and found out he was just a buffoon.. He was supposed to have simulated duels with the visitors… Sometimes, I would see myself in front of a 110-kilo German who thought that this was serious and left me exhausted. I must have been around 70 kilos then. That ended for me in no small mental conflict.”
Jiménez then changed course. “I took some facilities in Maspalomas that were almost in ruins and that included three old camels that had been engaged in agriculture. My idea was to keep the stables, take away the camels and replace them with horses, but it turned out that the change was not so simple. And, along the way, I realized that the business was in camels, in tourist safaris.”
So Jiménez began to bring new calves for his camel herd. “I got to have 300 camels doing safaris in Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife. Today I have 100 heads in the Canary Islands. 70 are in a breeding facility, because we export camels to Latin America and Europe, and another 30 are in tourist exploitation. And I also have another 100 camels grazing around El Aaiun. But we don’t have any facilities there, we function like Bedouins, we are nomads. Camels in Africa get meat and milk and with the meat they make a very good tajine.”
And how is that of exporting camels from the Canary Islands? Jiménez lists the origin of his recent buyers: France, the Netherlands, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Chile, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Granada, Huelva… “Some clients want them as pets. Others are interested in milk, because camel milk has medicinal uses and sells for eight euros per liter.while the milk cow has been sold for 30 cents”, explains the farmer.
“The milk tastes good. You just have to add a little sugar,” adds José M. Martín from Granada. It is not difficult to imagine a future in which the Canary camel is the center of a cutting-edge livestock, based on efficiency and research.
That is, if their exploitation survives the bad reputation that some attribute to it. Jiménez says that the cruelty denounced is necessarily an exception: «The camel cannot be treated badly because that does not work with his character. The horse responds to the blow of the whip; not the camel, it can get aggressive. For this reason, the attitude we have with them is always based on patience,” says Paco Jiménez, who also insists that the tourism business is not obsolete, that it maintains its demand. «The reality is that the camel ride is still the best possible way and the most respectful with the environment to see the Dunes of Maspalomas”.
José Carlos Caballero, an agronomist and representative of the Alianza Rural lobby, encourages him not to neglect his business: “The harassment of camels sounds to me like the same old war against the recreational use of animals. This is what has happened with the bulls and with the circus. Do you know what a recreational use of animals is? dogs that are pets, For example. The difference is that the camels in Lanzarote risk their survival as a breed and that they are much better treated and with much more dignity than a greyhound dressed in green and stuck in a 90-square-meter apartment.”
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