I am usually on the side of animals, wolves in particular, but there is something about a camel that just doesn’t appeal.
They either look aggressive or just just plain dumb and they make a pretty repulsive sight even when they are in love.
So those images of those crazy camel charging anti-protest camel-riders charging into the demonstrators in Egypt the other day just filled me with horror and made me fear for the first time that the nasty Mubarak regime has still got some fight in it.
Camels look best in the distance, (don’t a lot of ugly things?) preferably as a silhouette against a sunset or maybe just in the dark and moving away from me.
I have only ever liked the look of them in that wonderful scene in David Lean’s film, Lawrence of Arabia, when Omar Sharif emerges riding one through a cloud of sand.
An elderly military relative once told me, when I was a child, that he saw a camel bite off a rider’s kneecap and I have never liked them since. I am talking, of course about the one humped Dromedary or Arabian camel not those rather cuddly ones from China, the Bactrian camel. now they, in comparison, seem like pure Walt Disney.
So please, President Mubarak, keep those camels away from the peaceful protestors and don’t ever point one at me.
Here is the horrific news footage of a peaceful egyptian protest being attacked by men on horseback and a particularly crazed looking rider on a camel….barbaric scenes: