Camel Breeds & Their Values: The Complete Guide

The Omani, also called Mahri or Mahari, is the most prized of all dromedary breeds. Developed by the Mahra tribe of eastern Yemen and southern Oman over centuries of selective breeding for endurance and speed, the Omani is the dominant breed in modern Gulf camel racing. A purebred Omani racing sire can fetch over £3 million at elite auctions in Dubai and Doha, with the all-time record believed to exceed £50 million for a single proven sire.

The Omani is typically tall (180–195 cm at the shoulder), lean (350–500 kg), and pale in colour — usually cream, fawn or light bay. It has an exceptionally long stride, a deep chest, and a temperament suited to intensive training. Outside the racing context, Omani dairy camels also command a premium for the quantity and quality of their milk.

The Somali camel is the backbone of the Horn of Africa’s pastoralist economy. Somalia alone has around 7 million camels — the largest national herd in the world — and the Somali breed accounts for the majority of them. These are working animals, bred for milk production, meat, transport and as a store of wealth rather than for racing.

Somali camels are typically taller and lighter than Arabian dromedaries, with longer legs and a more angular frame. They are exceptionally well adapted to the harsh arid conditions of the Horn, able to travel 30–40 km a day in search of pasture and survive on minimal water. The breed is the foundation of a major export trade to Gulf states — Somali camels are loaded onto livestock ships at Berbera and Bosaso and shipped across the Gulf of Aden to Saudi Arabian markets, where they typically sell for two to four times their East African price.

The Indian dromedary — primarily the Marwari breed from Rajasthan and the Kachchhi breed from Gujarat — was once the dominant transport animal of the Thar Desert. The famous Pushkar Camel Fair, held annually in Rajasthan since the 17th century, is still the world’s largest camel market, though trade has declined sharply in recent decades as motorised transport has replaced working camels.

Rajasthani camels are typically smaller and more compact than their Arabian cousins, with darker coat colours (usually dark bay or brown) and a calmer temperament suited to village life. They are still used for ploughing, transport and milk in rural Rajasthan, but the Indian camel population has fallen from over 1 million in the 1990s to around 250,000 today — a decline that has led the Indian government to designate the camel as the state animal of Rajasthan in 2014, with associated legal protections.

Australia has the largest wild camel population in the world — estimated at around 1 million head, descended from a small number of dromedaries imported from India and Afghanistan in the 19th century as transport animals for the Outback. When motorised transport replaced them in the early 20th century, the camels were released into the wild and thrived, with no natural predators and an environment perfectly suited to their biology.

The Australian feral camel is not a distinct breed in the traditional sense — it is a mixed-breed dromedary population that has been shaped by natural selection for over 100 years. They are typically healthy, hardy, and of moderate size (400–550 kg). They are occasionally mustered and sold for meat export to the Middle East, or captured and trained as riding and tourism animals. Australian feral camels are the cheapest dromedaries in the world to acquire, though shipping them to the UK would add several thousand pounds to the cost.

The domestic Bactrian is the two-humped camel you’ll see in Mongolian steppe paintings, on the Silk Road, and occasionally in UK exotic-livestock collections. Smaller in numbers than the dromedary — only around 2–3 million domesticated Bactrians exist worldwide, mostly in Mongolia, northern China, Kazakhstan and southern Russia — they are stockier, heavier and far more cold-tolerant than their one-humped cousins. They can survive temperatures as low as -40°C, which is why they were the original pack animal of the Silk Road.

In the UK, Bactrians are considerably rarer than dromedaries and command a price premium of roughly 50–100%. Their thicker coat requires annual shearing (the wool is prized for premium textiles), and they are generally calmer and more tractable than dromedaries. A Bactrian can produce 5 kg of fine undercoat wool per year, which sells for £30–£60/kg raw at the farm gate.

The wild Bactrian camel is one of the rarest mammals on earth. Fewer than 1,000 individuals survive in the wild, in two small isolated populations — one in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia (the Great Gobi Reserve), and one in the Xinjiang province of north-western China (the Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve). It was only recognised as a separate species from the domestic Bactrian in 2008, following DNA analysis that showed the two diverged around 700,000 years ago.

Wild Bactrians are strictly protected under CITES Appendix I, which prohibits all international commercial trade, and are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. They cannot legally be bought, sold or exported. Their value, such as it is, lies entirely in conservation — the Wild Camel Protection Foundation, established in 1997, runs the only captive breeding programme for the species at a facility in Mongolia.

The nar — sometimes called the Turkestan camel or the Bukhtan — is a hybrid produced by crossing a male Bactrian with a female dromedary. The result is a larger, stronger animal with a single elongated hump (or sometimes a small hump and a half), combining the heat tolerance of the dromedary with the size and cold-hardiness of the Bactrian. They have been bred in Central Asia and Kazakhstan for centuries specifically for transport along the Silk Road routes, where conditions ranged from sub-zero mountain passes to scorching lowland deserts.

Nar hybrids are generally sterile, which limits their value as breeding stock but not as working animals. They are exceptionally rare outside Central Asia, with very few specimens in UK or European collections. Where they are available, prices typically sit between dromedary and Bactrian rates.

The elite racing camel is not a breed in the traditional sense — it is a category of selected dromedary bloodlines bred specifically for the multimillion-pound Gulf camel racing industry. The breeding programmes are run by the ruling families of the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with bloodlines tracked through dedicated registries similar to thoroughbred horse studbooks.

Top race winners and proven sires can fetch extraordinary sums at elite auctions held annually in Dubai, Doha and Riyadh. The most expensive camel ever publicly sold is believed to have fetched over £50 million, though exact figures at this level are rarely disclosed. Major race meetings offer prize money routinely exceeding £1 million per race, making elite racing camels one of the most lucrative single-animal investments in the world — albeit one accessible only to ultra-high-net-worth Gulf buyers.