Are There Wild Camels in the United States?

No wild camels roam the United States today. You will not find a free-ranging herd of dromedaries loping through the Mojave or a Bactrian camel grazing in Montana. But the relationship between camels and North America runs far deeper than most people realize, stretching back tens of millions of years to a time when the ancestors of every camel on Earth lived on this continent. The question has a surprisingly layered answer that touches on paleontology, a bizarre military experiment, and a modern conservation debate about whether camels should be brought back.

North America Is Where Camels Come From

The single most counterintuitive fact about camels is that they are, in evolutionary terms, an American animal. The ancestors of the genus Camelus first appeared on the North American continent roughly 40 to 45 million years ago, during the middle Eocene epoch.¹ For the vast majority of camel evolutionary history, North America was the center of their world. Multiple lineages radiated across the continent, from small, gazelle-sized browsers to towering animals that would have dwarfed modern dromedaries.

One of the most important of these ancient North American camels was Camelops, sometimes called the western camel. Camelops was large, standing roughly as tall as a modern dromedary and possibly taller, and ranged widely across what is now the western and central United States. Genetic analysis of ancient Camelops DNA has shown that it was a sister group to the Old World camels (dromedaries and Bactrian camels), not a close relative of the South American camelids like llamas and alpacas, as researchers had long assumed based on skeletal comparisons.² Protein analysis of fossil collagen has further supported that finding, showing that Camelops collagen sequences were more similar to dromedary sequences than to those of the Bactrian camel lineage.³

What this means is that the camels you associate with the Sahara or Central Asia are, in a real sense, expatriates. Their ancestors walked out of North America millions of years ago via land bridges, some heading south to give rise to llamas, guanacos, alpacas, and vicuñas in South America, and others heading northwest into Asia, eventually spreading across the deserts and steppes of the Old World. The molecular data suggest that Camelops and the Old World camel lineage diverged sometime in the late Miocene, millions of years before the end-Pleistocene extinction event wiped out North America’s native camels.²

When Humans and Camels Shared the Continent

Camels did not vanish from North America before people arrived. The first humans to reach the continent, Paleo-Indian groups crossing Beringia at the end of the last ice age, would have encountered Camelops and possibly other camelid species still living on the landscape. And they did more than just encounter them. Archaeological evidence from Wyoming has documented at least two Paleo-Indian kill sites where Camelops remains were found alongside bison. At one site associated with the Hell Gap cultural complex, a single Camelops was taken along with roughly a hundred bison in a parabolic sand dune trap. At a second site linked to Clovis-era people, a single camel appears to have been killed in an arroyo trap that was reused for bison hunting across multiple time periods.⁴

These finds tell us something interesting: early Americans knew how to hunt camels and did so using the same landscape-based trapping techniques they used for bison. The camels were not the primary target at either site, which makes sense given that bison were far more abundant, but they were clearly recognized as a food resource. The extinction of Camelops and other large North American mammals around 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, during the broader Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, ended the continent’s long relationship with native camels. Whether that extinction was driven primarily by human hunting, climate change, or some combination remains one of the longest-running debates in paleontology.

The 1850s Military Camel Experiment

Thousands of years after native camels vanished, the United States government tried to put camels back on American soil, this time intentionally. In the 1850s, the U.S. was struggling to extend control over the vast desert territories it had acquired after the Mexican-American War. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis championed an unusual solution: importing camels from the Ottoman Empire to serve as pack animals for a camel-mounted military unit that could operate across the arid Southwest.⁵

Congress appropriated funds in 1855, and by 1856 the first shipment of about 33 camels, mostly dromedaries, arrived at the port of Indianola, Texas. A second shipment followed the next year. The animals were tested on survey expeditions across the desert, and by some accounts they performed well. They could carry heavier loads than mules, go longer without water, and handle the harsh terrain. But the project had problems that had nothing to do with the camels themselves. The animals terrified horses and mules, making it nearly impossible to use them alongside existing military stock. Soldiers found them stubborn, smelly, and difficult to handle. And then the Civil War broke out in 1861, and the camel project lost its political champion when Jefferson Davis left Washington to lead the Confederacy.

By the 1860s, the military camel experiment was effectively over. The camels were scattered: some were sold to circuses and private owners, some were turned loose in the desert, and others simply perished.⁵ For decades afterward, scattered reports emerged of feral camels spotted in the deserts of Arizona, Nevada, and California. These sightings became the stuff of Western legend, often embellished with each retelling, but some were credible. The animals that had been released or escaped were technically capable of surviving in the desert, since the Southwest’s arid basins were not so different from the environments their species had evolved to tolerate. But there were never enough of them in any one area to form a breeding population, and the last confirmed sightings trailed off by the early twentieth century. A handful of unverified reports surfaced into the 1940s, but these were almost certainly exaggerations or cases of mistaken identity.

Why America’s Feral Camels Died Out While Australia’s Thrived

It is worth asking why the feral camels released in the American Southwest failed to establish themselves, because Australia’s experience with imported camels went very differently. Australia imported dromedaries for similar reasons, to carry freight across its vast inland deserts, beginning in the 1840s. When motorized transport made the animals obsolete, thousands were released. Those camels found an enormous, sparsely populated desert with few predators and limited competition, and their population exploded. Australia now has the largest population of feral dromedaries on Earth, estimated at various times in the hundreds of thousands to over a million, large enough to cause significant ecological damage and require periodic culls.

The American Southwest, by contrast, offered a much less forgiving environment for a small founder population. The camels released by the U.S. military numbered in the dozens at most, not the thousands. They were scattered across a wide area with no chance of finding mates. The landscape, while arid, was also filling rapidly with ranchers, railroads, and settlements that brought horses, cattle, and people armed with rifles. Feral camels were a curiosity and, occasionally, a target. There was simply no window for a tiny, dispersed group to breed, expand, and become self-sustaining the way Australia’s much larger founder population did. It was a numbers game, and the American camels lost it before it really started.

Where You Can Find Camels in America Today

Although no wild or feral camels exist in the United States, the animals are far from absent. Camels are kept across the country in zoos, on private farms, and in entertainment operations. The U.S. is part of a growing trend of breeding dromedaries outside their traditional pastoral range for tourism, recreation, and novelty.⁶ You can ride a camel at tourist attractions in several states, rent one for a private event, or visit one at a petting zoo. There are dedicated camel dairies in states like Missouri and California that sell camel milk, which has developed a niche market among people who cannot tolerate cow’s milk.

Private ownership of camels is legal in most U.S. states, though regulations vary. Some states classify them as exotic animals and require permits; others treat them like any other livestock. The animals are typically docile when well-handled, though they are large and powerful, and they can live thirty to fifty years in captivity, which makes them a serious long-term commitment. The number of camels in the U.S. is difficult to pin down precisely, but estimates generally range from a few thousand to perhaps five thousand, nearly all in private hands or institutional settings.

Occasionally, a camel escapes from a farm or a traveling attraction, and local news stations get a delightful segment out of it. These incidents sometimes spark brief confusion about whether “wild camels” exist in a given area, but the answer is always the same: no. Every camel in the United States is either owned by someone or has recently escaped from someone who owns it.

The Rewilding Debate

Given that camels evolved in North America and thrived here for tens of millions of years, some conservation thinkers have raised a provocative question: should they be brought back? In 2005, a group of researchers published a proposal in Nature arguing for “Pleistocene rewilding,” an approach to conservation that would reintroduce large animals, or their closest living relatives, to parts of North America where their ancestors once roamed. The goal was to restore ecological processes that had been missing for 13,000 years, like the grazing, seed dispersal, and predator-prey dynamics that megafauna once drove.⁷

Camels were among the animals considered in this framework, alongside elephants, lions, and cheetahs. The logic was that modern dromedaries and Bactrian camels are close relatives of Camelops, and the habitats where Camelops once lived still exist in the American West. In theory, reintroduced camels could fill the ecological niche their ancestors left vacant, potentially benefiting plant communities that co-evolved with large herbivores and now lack them.

The proposal generated enormous attention and equally enormous pushback. Critics pointed out that 13,000 years is a long time in ecological terms, and that ecosystems have reorganized in the absence of megafauna. Introducing large, non-native animals could cause more ecological disruption than benefit, compete with native wildlife, and create management headaches. The comparison with Australia’s feral camel crisis, where an uncontrolled camel population has damaged fragile desert ecosystems, was not lost on anyone. There were also practical objections: who would pay for it, who would manage the animals, and what happens when a free-ranging camel wanders onto a highway?

The Pleistocene rewilding idea remains a thought experiment rather than anything approaching policy. No government agency has seriously considered releasing camels onto public land, and the proposal’s authors acknowledged from the beginning that it was meant partly to challenge how we think about what “native” means in a continent shaped by extinction. The concept has been more influential as a framework for thinking about missing ecological roles than as a literal plan of action.

What “Wild” Actually Means in This Context

Part of the confusion around this question comes from the word “wild” itself, which gets used loosely and can mean different things depending on context. In biology, a truly wild animal belongs to a population that has never been domesticated. By that definition, the only genuinely wild camels left on Earth are wild Bactrian camels (Camelus ferus), a critically endangered species with fewer than a thousand individuals surviving in remote parts of Mongolia and northwestern China. These animals are genetically distinct from domesticated Bactrian camels and have never been tamed.

A feral animal, by contrast, is a domesticated animal that has returned to living in the wild without direct human management. Australia’s enormous dromedary population is feral, not wild. The camels released in the American Southwest in the 1860s were also feral. The distinction matters because feral populations can, in principle, be established anywhere a domestic animal escapes and finds conditions tolerable enough to survive and breed. Wild populations exist only where a species has maintained continuous, unbroken residence.

By either definition, the answer for the United States is the same: there are no wild camels and no feral camels. The native wild camels went extinct during the Pleistocene. The feral population that briefly existed after the military experiment never became self-sustaining. And while thousands of domesticated camels live in the country today, they are owned, managed, and kept behind fences. The American landscape that shaped the camel family over 40 million years of evolution has been without a free-living camel for at least a century, and likely longer.

Camels the Southwest Never Forgot

Even without living camels, the legacy of the military camel experiment has lingered in the cultural memory of the American Southwest in ways that go beyond historical footnotes. The town of Quartzsite, Arizona, holds an annual celebration called “Hi Jolly Days,” named after Hadji Ali, one of the Ottoman camel drivers (anglicized to “Hi Jolly”) who was brought to the U.S. to manage the imported herd. His grave, topped with a small stone pyramid and a metal camel silhouette, is a roadside attraction in the Quartzsite cemetery and one of the stranger monuments in the American West. Several other towns along the old camel survey routes in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona have incorporated the camel experiment into their local history and tourism.

The ghost of Camelops is even harder to forget if you know where to look. Fossil camel bones turn up regularly at Pleistocene sites across the western states, from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles to cave deposits in the Great Basin. For paleontologists, these fossils are a routine reminder that the camels of the Sahara have more in common with North America’s deep history than most people would ever guess. The desert that seems so perfectly suited to a camel’s abilities was, for most of the camel lineage’s existence, exactly where they lived. They did not adapt to the desert elsewhere and get imported. They were shaped by it here, on this continent, and then carried those adaptations with them when they left.