Books in Review 
Nomads’ Best Friend 
Hilde Gauthier-Pilters 
by Valerius Geist 
The Camel, by Hilde Gauthier-Pilters 
and Anne Innis Dagg. The University 
of Chicago Press, $26.00; 224 pp., 
illus. 
This is an excellent book, which I 
recommend if only for sheer reading 
pleasure. The book details — without 
generating boredom — the life of the 
camel, a remarkable creature that in- 
habits, along with nomad herders, 
some of the world’s most inhospitable 
landscapes. The authors give a vivid 
introduction to the ecology of the Sa- 
hara and to the life of the animal 
that makes it possible for humans to 
exploit the hot desert. Camels and 
nomads live in a bond of mutual de- 
pendence: the camel needs nomads to 
give it water from wells in summer, 
and nomads need camels to provide 
milk, wool, transportation, and meat, 
and above all, to provide work and 
give meaning to their lives. To live 
by the camel requires attributes that 
are highly valued by all people, re- 
gardless of the society. Yet, the 
shadow of civilization — if one can call 
it such — has descended on these 
hardy, independent people and their 
way of life, as well as on their camels. 
If humans abandon the nomadic life, 
the fate of the camel will be sealed, 
for without humans and their wells, 
the camel could not live where it now 
is common. This is a somewhat sim- 
plistic overview, but no review could 
capture the detailed knowledge re- 
vealed in the pages of this book. 
The work of Hilde Gauthier-Pilters 
has formerly been accessible only to 
those literate in German and French. 
She has written several popular books 
on her work*, delightful accounts that 
minimize the very real dangers and 
hardships she endured as a woman 
scientist alone in the Sahara. In Eng- 
lish there is only one paper, a turgid 
but clear account of her understanding 
of the ecology of camel and nomad 
in the Sahara. This paper, presented 
a decade ago at a symposium on un- 
gulate behavior, is a classic. She had 
earlier studied captive New World 
camelids, but soon shifted to studying 
the ecology of dromedaries and no- 
mads in North Africa. 
Anne Innis Dagg made her name 
by studying giraffes and, later, the 
gaits of ungulates. After writing two 
books on wildlife management in Can- 
ada, Dagg teamed up with Gauthier- 
Pilters for several study trips into the 
Sahara. The Camel is the fruit of their 
collaboration, although it is based 
largely on the work of Gauthier- 
Pilters, who also wrote most of the 
chapters and supplied all the photo- 
graphs. The book’s first aim is to give 
an account of camel autecology; the 
second, to describe the interdepen- 
dence of nomads and camels; and the 
third, to compile a bibliography on 
camel biology. The result is a most 
readable, informative, well-illustrated 
book with two appendixes and a useful 
bibliography. The work is divided into 
two parts: one deals with camels; the 
other with the people who depend on 
them. 
The first part — short on theory and 
long on observations — is a reasonably 
broad, but condensed, account of what 
we know of camel biology. This section 
is well thought out and devoid of the 
superficialities so infuriatingly com- 
mon to the “six month wonders” whose 
field studies too often grace our sci- 
entific journals. This book is solid 
stuff! Authoritatively written with 
plenty of hard work to back each of 
its sentences, the book is also an ex- 
ample of how the nomad’s traditional 
knowledge of camels can be used to 
good advantage without losing scien- 
tific objectivity. Nowhere is there a 
better account and explanation of the 
camel’s peculiarities than here. 
This hard, scientific account makes 
it very plain why the camel, in the 
past, in the present, and almost cer- 
tainly in the future, will be the only 
means by which humans can exploit 
the desert. Without camels the scarce 
desert resources are almost completely 
beyond human utilization, just as the 
tundra would be without caribou, or 
reindeer, as well as migratory birds 
and anadromous, migratory fishes. 
Conventional agriculture is possible on 
only a tiny fraction of hot desert 
ranges. Camel herding with its con- 
comitant nomadism is one feasible 
means of survival. The practice of 
camel herding, however, requires free- 
roaming over vast areas in order to 
exploit rains and fresh vegetation; it 
cannot tolerate borders. It also re- 
quires that Occidental cultures aban- 
don their holier-than-thou attitude to- 
ward nomads: the belief that our way 
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