From Australian outback to Saudi tables

The only thing more worrisome, he says, is massive land clearing in parts of the country.

The continent's highest profile battle with wildlife has long been against rabbits. First imported as pets in the mid-19th century, rabbits bred to plague proportions before the introduction of diseases to control their population. So reviled are rabbits here that Australians even have their own alternative to the Easter Bunny: the Easter Bilby, a native animal driven close to extinction by imported predators.

The list of feral menaces also includes buffaloes, foxes, horses, goats, and the cane toad, a poisonous amphibian brought to northern Queensland by sugar cane farmers in the 1930s to fight off insects. There are feral cats and dogs. And across Australia's tropical north there are as many as 30 million wild pigs – whose ancestors reportedly escaped from Captain James Cook, tearing through rain forests and savannahs.

Almost all have been harvested commercially. Before fur became unfashionable, hunters spread out across the Australian countryside at night, snaring foxes for their pelts. Across Australia's "Top End," wild pigs are shipped to Germany for sale as wild boar. Even the cane toad ends up as kitschy coin purses sold to tourists.

Experts say Australia is unlikely ever to get rid of the pests altogether. The best that conservationists can hope for now, many say, is controlling their populations.

"Eradication means killing the last animal. That will never happen," says Tony English, a University of Sydney expert on feral animals. "The country's just too big, and there's too many of them."

Besides commercialization and shooting feral pests, wildlife officials have experimented with poisons and introduced diseases like myxomatosis, which helped bring the rabbit population under control. There have been programs to sterilize animals and even discussion of how genetic engineering might help.

Many still argue, though, that the best way to control feral animal populations is to let the forces of commerce go to work. "If you make an animal worth something, then there's an incentive for people to go out and hunt them out," says Mr. English.

But some environmentalists see another side as well. "The risk is that there's an incentive to maintain the population rather than eradicate it," says Sherwin, of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Still, these days, it's hard to find a note of pessimism among central Australia's cameleers. Although some do offer one caveat: Catching camels is hard work.

"It's a lot harder than rounding up cattle," says Ian Conway, the owner of Kings Creek Station and, after 30 years of chasing, catching, and sending small groups of camels overseas, one of the camel industry's pioneers.

"Camels are clever animals," he says. "Even after 30 years, they still defy us."

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