Wild Fact #883 – The Reunion of Very Old Friends – Cama
If my scheduling is going right then this should be February 3, 2010, which is unfortunate because this means I will be spending the entire day flying back to the Yukon. It is crazy how fast this vacation has gone. I know as I sit here writing this that I actually haven’t gone on vacation yet but I am pretty certain it will go by fast. I trust all of you have been enjoying reading about the unusual cross breeds. Today we are going to discuss an animal that was engineered in 1998.
As you may have guessed the Cama is a cross between a male Camel and a female Llama. A team of scientists cross bred these two animals with the hope of getting the best of both worlds. The result was an animal with short ears and a long tails which it got from the camel side. The llama side of the family contributed the cloven hooves. If you look at the picture you will notice that the cama does not have the famous hump. The birth of this cama was a pretty impressive feat since it was the first time the Old World’s Camels were successfully bred with a Western Hemisphere Llama since they split up more than 30 million years ago.
Believe it or not it took scientists two years to get the artificial insemination which they were hoping would create an animal with the soft llama fur. I know what you are thinking! Llamas have nice fur so why did they need to cross breed them? Just use the naturally occurring animals. Well this would work but humans tend to be greedy so they were hoping to create a larger animal with this prized fur. You see, that way they can make more profit by selling more of this fur.
I am starting to see that humans are making hybrids in order to create more wealth. Do you agree with people intervening with nature? Do we have the right to replace evolution? Let me know what you think!
Well that is it for me for today. I have a plane to go and catch!
Rama the Cama at 2 days old!
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:08 AM
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”* As an official “scary Christian chick”, I will say that animals should be left as God intended. It seems that there are often repercussions resulting from cross breeding species (e.g. reader’s comment on the Liger post) and sadly it isn’t the mad scientist who suffers for them, but the animal.
*borrowed from an old, OLD Kenny Rogers movie (’cause it fit
February 5th, 2010 at 12:12 PM
I couldn’t agree more with you, Jen!
Unfortunately, greed and money will always play a part in these things. The whole purpose of the Cama is to make people rich. I don’t agree with fooling around with nature just for money.
My curious, science side of me though does find it fascinating that they are able to create animals with certain qualities, however, that doesn’t make it right.