Mammals · plate 24 of 60
Camel
Camelus dromedarius
Drinks once a week and gets on with it.
Only 0.7% of people are Camels. (estimated)
If you're a Camel
You cover long distances on very little and do not make a fuss about it. A dromedary can drink over a hundred liters in about ten minutes and then not bother again for a week; you have the same approach to rest, praise and dinner. You travel in company, prefer a steady pace to a fast one, and will go anywhere, provided it is far.
The hump stores fat, not water; a camel stays hydrated by letting its body temperature swing six degrees over a day so it hardly needs to sweat.
The Camel as a spirit animal
Matching a Camel says you are the one who is still going when everyone else has stopped. You are steady, frugal with your own reserves and unimpressed by emergencies. The flaw is that you will walk straight past a well because you were not thirsty yet, and you hold a grudge the way a camel holds water: for a long time and in large quantities. Your friends know to pack snacks.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Camel
Do
- Match their pace; they don't speed up and they don't stop.
- Travel together; camels like a herd and so do they.
- Offer food when they look fine, not when they look hungry, because by then they have gone too far already.
Don't
- Don't rush them; a camel pushed too hard just sits down.
- Don't mistake the long silence for agreement.
When it goes wrong: Under pressure a Camel folds its legs and sits where it is, immovable and faintly disgusted; wait, make the destination worth it and let them stand up in their own time.
The Camel in a relationship
You love steadily, over distance and for the long haul, without needing much in return and without saying much either. Dromedary herds are a handful of females with young and one male, and the bond is to the group as much as to anyone in it. You show affection by turning up. Reliably.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 6
- Boldness
- 5
- Energy
- 3
- Curiosity
- 2
- Devotion
- 5
- Roaming
- 10
- A camel's red blood cells are oval rather than round, so blood keeps flowing when thickened by dehydration and the cells can swell when it drinks without bursting.
- A camel can lose a quarter of its body weight in water and recover; most mammals are in serious trouble well before that.
- Australia has the world's largest population of wild dromedaries, descended from animals imported in the nineteenth century.
Camels in literature
- The Camel — Just So Stories (How the Camel Got His Hump), Rudyard Kipling (1902)
- The Camel — Aesop's Fables (The Camel and Zeus), Aesop (550 BCE)
- The Camel — Fables (The Camel and the Floating Sticks), Jean de La Fontaine (1668)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Camel's. If you got Camel, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other mammals
WolfRed FoxBrown BearPolar BearLionTigerLeopardCheetahElephantGiraffeHippopotamusGorillaOrangutanSlothKoalaKangarooPlatypusOtterBeaverBadgerRaccoonHedgehogBatDolphinSperm Whale
Among the 60
Friedrich Specht (1839–1909), The New Student's Reference Work, Chandler B. Beach (ed.) (1914). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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