Tell me in the comments if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty confident you don't know this much about camels:
Those "cute" fluffy creatures that have been living amongst us humans, well Arabs, for soooo long, but most of us know so little about them.
Well, our ancestors tried to warn us from them with some idioms. Things like: "Like a camel, he laughs once a lifetime" referring to the fact that camels mutilate their lips during their first and only smile. Oh, you didn't know this? Keep reading we're still warming up here.
Actually, we might be misunderstanding this idiom. It might be referring to camels being sad, scary, and evil creatures, hiding mountains grudge. Their lips are not made for smiling!
Before we get to the scary part that might as well be just a normal reaction to human cruelty, let us talk about...
Camels in Tunisia
Actually, Tunisia, that little dot in the map, is a contradictory place where you can see one thing and it's opposite 400 km away from each other. I'm talking about the north, where camels are so rare that you would stop your car and commit a crime to get a picture with them, and the south, where you'd go through a herd of camels in public transport and be the weird guy who took out his phone to take a picture.
In the south, in the desert I mean, they are the "community", the natives, and we are like the street cats or dogs, wondering around, ignored and invisible.
Of course, there is an exception here: The camels that are raised by annoying humans who only have a few of them and who keep them close and use them in tourism.
To take the first photo, which was somewhere near the sea, in the north of Tunisia, I went through three important steps. The first was to either convince myself that it's legal to go on a private farm and "hang out" with the animals in it, or that it's cool to do something illegal every once in a while. I honestly can't remember which one I chose but I remember I did it in less than a second. The second step was to convince myself that camels are harmless and to convince the camels that random people are harmless, that didn't take long either. And finally, to get my well-deserved reward.
In the south, however, it only takes standing the judging, curious looks from those southern Tunisians who think camels are a too common sight to be photographed.
Camels are known for their patience, right?
Wrong! When it comes to Humans, anyway. Camels can stand the heat, the burning sand, the lack of water, pretty much anything that comes from nature, except for humans. They're proud, they're vindictive, and they hate being treated badly (aka they hate humans). Actually, anyone can get their point. If you were a creature that strong and capable and special, would you stand being humiliated by those small, two-legged creatures who think they own the world but can't survive three days in the desert?
They say that horses like it when their owner sleeps close to them. So do camels, but for different reasons. While horses like to smell humans, camels like to murder them! And you won't probably hear this from a Tunisian or Egyptian guy in a desert, while he's trying to convince you to take a ride on his camel and take some photos for 5 or 6$.
How do they usually murder their enemies/owners?
And I'm writing the word "owner" with much hesitation because I don't think camels see it that way, and I can't blame them. Anyway, their typical method is to sit on the victim while he's sleeping and that's a pretty guaranteed approach if you ask me, what with the weight of camels and the fragility of humans!
What happens when things go wrong?
The only possibility for "the camel way" of murder not to work would be if the victim wasn't really there when the murderer-to-be starts executing his plan. Sometimes a camel sees his "owner's" clothes on the floor and does the deadly mistake of assuming the man is sleeping there. Guess what happens then? And why did I call it deadly?
In that case, a camel wouldn' stand to be a failure, he would be planning his crime for a lifetime so failing would ruin him. He wouldn't need to be punished for it, he'd punish himself by... SUICIDE! Yes, he'd hit his head against a wall until he dies rather than live another day as a slave for a mean, small, ignorant, cruel, "human" being.