"It’s our fault," declares Dame Dr Jane Goodall DBE. "We absolutely brought the coronavirus on ourselves by our absolute disrespect of animals and the natural world. We will suffer a worse pandemic than this if we don’t stop destroying animal habitats," says the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, emphatically.
"We’ve been lucky with this one in that, although it’s very infectious, the rate of death, compared to the rate of infection, is low," she continues. "Ebola is less infectious but the percentage of infected people who die is much greater. Imagine a really infectious disease with a very high percentage of deaths? That could happen if we don’t learn from this experience. Those studying zoonotic diseases have been saying this for years but people haven’t learnt."
Yet despite the havoc wreaked among humans by Covid over the past year, there is still hope for some of the world’s most endangered species, as are highlighted by the latest instalment of Sir David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet.
Best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees, since she first went to Tanzania in 1960, we are aware of Dr Goodall’s passion for great apes.
But today she joins me on Zoom with fellow conservationist and explorer John Hare to discuss another extraordinary species that has defied all the odds – the only recently identified wild camel.
A Perfect Planet will focus on how this remarkable double-humped animal has managed to survive for centuries in sparse desert regions near the Chinese-Mongolian border by drinking salt water and, as temperatures hit -40C, snow that blows in from Siberia. Yet Camelus ferus was only confirmed as a separate species from the domestic Bactrian camel in 2008, after five years of genetic tests by the Veterinary University of Vienna revealed they had been separated from any other known form of camel over 750,000 years ago.
With just 1,000 wild camels still roaming today, they are now officially the eighth most critically endangered large mammal in the world.
The past 100 years alone have seen the wild camel face such adversity that it’s a miracle any are still alive at all. In the Twenties, the species was forcibly separated by a road and railway built by the Chinese, with around 450 now living in the Gobi in Mongolia, and another 600 in Lop Nur, in northwest China’s troubled Xinjiang province.
In 1995, Hare, a former Army officer, became the first foreigner in 45 years to be granted permission to enter Lop Nur, where he later founded the Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve on a former nuclear test site. One of the largest nature reserves in the world, it spans 96,000 square miles – two thirds the size of France.
The wild camels living on the Chinese side of the border survived 43 atmospheric nuclear tests until the Chinese stopped the testing in 1979.
"The Chinese stopped testing but the bombs they dropped were far more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima," Hare says. "Yet there are no three-humped camels, they survived with no aberrations. No other mammal could touch salt water – not even the wolf. Domestic camels could not drink it, yet these wild camels have existed on it for centuries."
In Mongolia, the wild camels live in the Great Gobi ‘A’ Strictly Protected Area, which was established in the Seventies by the UN. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, they have access to fresh water. Hare started a breeding centre on the Mongolian side with eight wild camels – now there are 35, with five new calves born in 2020. He is fundraising for a second facility, 350 miles away, with the help of artist Charlotte Williams, who is selling paintings of the beautiful creatures to raise money for his charity, the Wild Camel Protection Foundation, of which Dr Goodall is honorary life patron. The rationale is not to reintroduce the animals back into the Gobi but to have a nucleus of a separate species, should the worst happen and the other wild camels get wiped out forever. Thanks to Hare’s work, that is looking more unlikely.
The wild camels prefer to mate at the coldest time of year, which as he points out "is slightly different to the human species", although similar to domestic Bactrian camels, who are encouraged to breed by having buckets of ice cold water thrown at their backsides. Arguing that the camel, which stores fat in its hump(s), enabling it to gain nourishment when food is scarce, "is much more intelligent than the horse", Hare adds: "They are classified as a migratory species – they go from waterpoint to waterpoint, which can sometimes be 100 miles apart. And they go in single file. You’d imagine them spreading out and meandering along but they go along a single track. They’ve used the same track for centuries."
Marvelling at their survival against all odds, Dr Goodall says: "In the middle of what we are calling the sixth great extinction, to find a new species surviving and flourishing in this way is very exciting indeed."
Dr Goodall has "never been busier" in lockdown and reveals that she has already had the Pfizer jab, while Hare is due to be immunised.
Both worry about the effect of climate change on biodiversity – and the impact of the pandemic on endangered species generally.
"The demise of ecotourism made a huge difference to many African parks, because it was the revenue that helped fund the rangers who protected the area," says Dr Goodall.
"In some national parks, the rate of poaching has gone way up. And of course for chimpanzees and gorillas, the fear has been that they would catch this disease, as they’re certainly very susceptible to other coronaviruses.’
Pointing out that another coronavirus, Mers, was spread by camels, she adds: ‘When we traffic animals, when we send them around the world, we create conditions where a virus can jump from an animal to a person. They say 75 per cent or more of new human diseases start from some kind of pathogen of a virus or a bacteria, jumping from an animal to a human. Almost certainly this pandemic did start in a wildlife market in China. And it only takes one animal to infect one human."
There is still hope, though. Praising Hare’s work, Dr Goodall says: "The one good thing today is the number of people who are very passionate about particular species. If it wasn’t for people like that, many other animals who still cling on, sometimes barely, would be gone. That’s the one hope, that there’s enough people to care about all these different creatures to keep a semblance of the original biodiversity alive.’
For more information, visit wildcamels.com, johnhare.org and charlotte-williams.com.
