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| | | SPEEDBOATS OF THE DESERT
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Go to the Listen Again page | | | | | How do you breed the perfect racing camel?Ìý | | | |
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Julia Skidmore is in charge of the breeding programme for Britain’s largest racehorse owner, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, crown prince of Dubai and defence minister for the United Arab Emirates. Lulu, as she is universally known, isn’t breeding the Sheikh’s thoroughbred race horses - she is scientific director of the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai. Set up to understand the complicated workings of camels’ reproductive system the centre is producing winners for Dubai’s famous camel races. Clare Balding travels to Dubai to find out more.
| | |  | | Camel racing in Dubai
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Camel racing is big business. It’s also very exciting . During a race 50 or more camels may compete, trainers and owners in jeeps speed round the inside of the track, talking to their jockeys on radio sets. The jockeys ride behind the camel’s hump and wield a riding crop the length of a fishing rod. Camel racing has always been a Bedouin pastime, but during the last 20 years or so it has become a hugely popular event. But there’s no betting and no tote, the races and prizes are funded by the royal family as a kind of public service.
A good racing camel can pass hands for millions of pounds and so breeding from a good racer makes sense. However it’s the females who are the better racers - they’re far better tempered than their male counterparts but a camel pregnancy takes 13 months, a racing camel out of action for pregnancy or lactation is losing its owner good hard cash. To tackle the problem the Sheikh went to Twink Allen, head of the Equine Fertility Unit in Newmarket who knows everything there is to know about the breeding of thoroughbreds. Twink’s next move was to set up the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai. At that time he knew everything there was to know about camel reproduction- precisely nothing as the research had never been done.
Lulu Skidmore was one of Twink’s students and was keen to get involved in this project so now she runs the camel reproduction centre 40 km out of Dubai. There her lab concentrates on embryo transfer and artificial insemination – using surrogate mothers to produce top-class racing breeds.
Racing females are encouraged to ovulate using a cocktail of chemicals devised by Lulu. When the time is right they are artificially inseminated, and then in an early stage of pregnancy, the embryos are flushed out and implanted into less flighty females who bring them to term . This means a good racing female can produce far more offspring that she ever would naturally and without interrupting her career. So everyone is happy - except perhaps the man who has to collect the sperm samples from the stallion.
In Speedboats of the desert, Clare Balding 91Èȱ¬ sports presenter travels to Dubai and Newmarket to meet the main players in the world of camel fertility research, and sees for herself the practicalities of camel embryo transfer and artificial insemination.
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