Letters to the Editor
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Objects don't have gender, living beings do
Oh, heavens! This isn't anything about men and women and institutional sexism and anthropromorphizing camels and imagined genders.
Camels, like other mammals, come in two genders: male and female. This is not your imagination. They even have similar reproductive systems as the primates - who after all are mammals, including hairless primates like homo sapiens.
It's far from uncommon in any sort of human/non-human interactive sphere (showjumping, dog training, heck even dolphin training) to respect the gender of the individual being addressed and use the proper, gendered pronouns: he or she. That is, we would say of a well-regarded Schutzhund competitor "he's a really reliable dog in the tracking, and quite a pleasure to watch as he works." Saying "it" would be not only disrespectful, but silly. Mammals have gender.
A quite common extension of this is to use the more informal words for gendered individuals, like "boys" or "girls." Yes, we could call them "males," or use the proper, species-specific gendered descriptors (mares, stallions, bitches, cows, bulls, and so forth) but sometimes it's just as comfortable to say that "the boys are out in the exercise yard" rather than "the male dogs are out in the exercise yard."
Perhaps not as common is to refer to a "lady" or a "gentleman," but far from unusual. I'd say one hears this alot when discussing mares: "she's quite a fine lady when doing two-tempe changes isn't she?" In the proper place and time, it's simply an extension of everyday language.
Those who spend alot of time with nonhuman mammals quite naturally come to know them as individuals - and of course gender is a part of that. We need not get all snicker-y about it, or even assume that someone who kisses a nonhuman is, you know, an odd duck like me. Affection between species, even in Saudi Arabia, isn't against the law. We do share our planet and (many of us) our everyday lives with non-human mammals. It'd be a sad world indeed if the only friends we could make and enjoy spending time with were other two-leggers. People are great, I'm also proud of the fact that humans have a clever way of bringing other species into their every day social (and familial) lives. If there's an uniquely human trait that's worth of celebration, I'd vote this is the one.
Comparing a camel to a vibrator is sort of sad. Only someone with an awfully pinched view of the living world would fail to see the problem.
Peace,
Fausty