It was a quiet morning on the farm. Everything was going on as usual. After a few hours the cleaners of the camel paddock while trying to wash the feeding and watering trough reported that there was no water. The cleaners called the supervisors and the supervisors called the forman and the forman called the maintenance team to check what is wrong with the water supply. Our very efficient maintenance team checked the whole water system and reported that someone have opened the tap connected with the main tanks which drained all the water in the tanks.

So, the big question was who went to that extent of stupidity to drain all the water from the whole tank? Everyone was looking for the culprit. We could not find him/her but the incident kept repeating again after few days. While everyone was scratching their head, one night the nightguards caught the culprit red-handed trying to open the water tap. It was one of our camels. Deep into the night when everyone sleeps, this mischievous mommy goes out from the paddock and grazes on the few greens available here and there around the farm and if she feels thirsty, she opens the tap and drinks the water directly from that. Although she can skillfully open the tap, she didn’t know or had any intention to close it. So, all the water gets drained in the night and as our farm is in the middle of the desert, the water gets dry very quickly.

The question to ask here is, out of thousands of animals how did she manage to get out of the paddock? The answer lies in the design of the paddocks. The way our paddocks are designed if the camels want they can get out from there easily as the fences around the paddock are very low for a camel. But normally they don’t and why is that? To answer that we have to understand the psychology of a camel.

Camels are used to graze in the deserts and travel for a very long distance in a day to search for food. If we think carefully, the landscape of the desert areas is such that there are almost no obstacles that they need to jump across or climb to pass. As they don’t have to engage themselves in jumping or climbing fences, they usually don’t have the tendency to cross any fences even if it is a foot or so higher. Even on our farm, we have seen that, if there is a rope lying on the ground the camels are even very much reluctant to go over it. By understanding that psychology we were able to keep the fences of the farm lower which saves a lot of construction materials and construction cost. However, from time to time we have some mischievous animals who like to jump across the fences. One of such cases on our farm was one of the teenage Sudani and Emirati cross tall bull (almost 4 years old) crossed over to the paddock of teenage female (almost 4 years old) and made three of them pregnant. We only noticed them after the females were close to delivering and started developing the udder and giving off other pregnancy-related signs.

The bottom line is, it is very important to understand the psychology of the animals you want to deal with. It can give you a great advantage over others if you can understand the animals. However, there will be some animals there who will be different.