When Hunting Camels Was Illegal in Arizona

Yes, Arizona really did have a law prohibiting camel hunting—but before you start planning your desert safari, you should know it's no longer on the books. This genuinely bizarre piece of legislation existed for decades, protecting an animal that had no business being in the Sonoran Desert in the first place.

The U.S. Army's Camel Experiment

In 1853, the U.S. Senate approved $30,000 to import camels from the Middle East for military use. The Army thought these "ships of the desert" would be perfect pack animals for the arid Southwest. Operating out of Camp Verde, Texas, the United States Camel Corps tested whether these humped imports could outperform horses and mules in harsh desert conditions.

Spoiler alert: the camels actually performed quite well. They could carry heavier loads, travel longer without water, and handle the scorching heat better than traditional pack animals. But when the Civil War broke out in 1861, the experimental program quietly fell apart. Nobody had time to worry about exotic livestock when the nation was tearing itself in half.

Wild Camels Roaming Arizona

The military sold off their camels to anyone who'd take them—menageries, zoos, carnivals, and mining companies. Many escaped or were simply released into the wild, where they wandered across Arizona and neighboring states for decades. Imagine being a cowboy in 1880s Arizona and encountering a seven-foot-tall camel emerging from behind a saguaro cactus.

By 1901, Arizona had enough wild camels roaming around that lawmakers felt compelled to protect them. Section 578 of the revised Arizona law made it illegal for any person to "hunt, pursue, take, kill or destroy" a camel. The law remained in effect even after Arizona declared camels extinct in the state in 1913—though hunters claimed to spot them near Yuma into the 1950s.

What Happened to the Law?

Today, the Arizona Game & Fish Department—the agency that regulates all hunting in the state—confirms it has no regulations regarding camels. The quirky protection law has been removed from the books, joining countless other obsolete statutes that once made perfect sense but now seem absurdly specific.

So technically, if you somehow found a wild camel in Arizona today, you could legally hunt it. Good luck with that search though—the last confirmed sighting was over 70 years ago, and they're definitely not hiding in plain sight like desert roadrunners.

The Last Ghost Camels

For decades after the law was passed, stories circulated about mysterious camel sightings across the Southwest:

• A prospector claimed a rogue camel trampled him in 1883
• Railroad workers reported seeing camels near the tracks in Nevada
• The infamous "Red Ghost"—a ghostly camel allegedly carrying a human corpse—terrorized Arizona Territory in the 1890s

Whether these stories were real or frontier tall tales remains debatable, but they captured the imagination of a generation that had witnessed one of America's strangest military experiments gone awry.