The short answer: Australia has hundreds of thousands of feral camels because people imported camels for transport in the 19th and early 20th centuries, then abandoned many of them when motor vehicles took over. The part where this somehow ends with giant wild camel herds wandering the Outback is, unfortunately, completely real.
Australia Imported Camels Because the Outback Was Not Getting Any Smaller
Australia’s national feral-camel plan says the first dromedary arrived in 1840. The big import period came later: between 1866 and 1907, up to 20,000 camels were brought into the country.
They were useful. Extremely useful, actually.
Camels could carry people and freight through remote, dry country where other transport options were basically “good luck.” They became part of the infrastructure that helped open inland Australia.
Then trucks showed up.
Technology has a cruel way of turning yesterday’s essential transportation network into tomorrow’s very large animal wandering around looking for water.
Why Are There Feral Camels in Australia?
From the 1920s onward, motor vehicles increasingly replaced working camels. Large numbers of domestic camels were abandoned during the 1920s and 1930s, and feral populations spread through the arid interior.
The animals were spectacularly well suited to the assignment nobody gave them: survive in the desert and make more camels.
Australia now manages feral camels as an established pest because large mobs can damage vegetation, water sources, infrastructure and culturally significant places.
How Many Feral Camels Are in Australia?
This is where false precision becomes its own invasive species.
Australia once used an estimate of around one million feral camels in 2008. After better surveys and several years of management, that figure was revised sharply downward. By the end of the federally supported Australian Feral Camel Management Project in 2013, the estimate was around 300,000.
A January 2026 ABC report, citing government and management sources, put the present national estimate in a very broad range of roughly 300,000 to 1 million.
Translation: there are a lot of camels, but anyone pretending to know the exact nationwide camel headcount is showing more confidence than the data allows.
Australia Really Did Remove About 160,000 Camels
The old version of this story had the timing wrong. The major Australian Feral Camel Management Project ran from 2009 through 2013, not as a 2008 cull.
About 160,000 camels were removed during the project through aerial and ground control, mustering and commercial removal. The goal was not to make camels disappear from Australia. It was to reduce damaging concentrations around important environmental and cultural sites.
And yes, management continues. In early 2026, large mobs were again causing problems around remote Northern Territory communities while searching for water.
Can Australia Just Export the Camels?
Australia does export live camels. It just does not export anything close to enough of them for “sell the camels” to be a national population-control strategy by itself.
Australian government livestock statistics recorded only 42 camel exports in calendar year 2025.
So the old story’s idea that Somalia or Saudi Arabia could simply turn the feral-camel problem into a lucrative export business was a little too tidy.
Forty-two exports versus hundreds of thousands of feral camels is not a business plan.
It is a rounding error with humps.
The Weird Part Is That the Original Plan Worked
People brought camels to Australia because camels are astonishingly good at surviving long trips through dry country.
Then people stopped needing them.
The camels, however, did not receive the memo.