🐫 Bactrian camel

The Bactrian camel is the two-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus), a domestic animal of the cold deserts and steppes of Central Asia: Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and north-western China. FAO calls it the “camel of the mountains”, as opposed to the one-humped dromedary, the “camel of the plains”. Bactrians are far fewer: an old estimate cited by FAO puts them at about 2 million of the world's 18 million camels, and a 2024 review at roughly one tenth.

The Bactrian was domesticated 4–6 thousand years ago in western Central Asia, near today's border between Iran and Turkmenistan. Its wild relative is a separate species, the wild camel Camelus ferus: in 2025 the IUCN Red List moved it from Critically Endangered to Endangered, and only 780–1,380 adults remain, all of them in Mongolia and China.

A Bactrian gives slightly less milk than a dromedary: in one study in Kazakhstan, 2.9 litres a day versus 3.2. But its milk is richer: according to FAO, 100 g contains 5.0 g of fat, 3.9 g of protein, 4.2 g of lactose and about 76 kcal, plus plenty of vitamin D. The figures depend strongly on the area: across five provinces of Mongolia, fat ranged from 5 to 6.2%. As with the dromedary, there is no measurable β-lactoglobulin. In Mongolia Bactrian milk is made into cheese, butter and yoghurt; in Kazakhstan, into fermented shubat.

Mongolia keeps alive the coaxing ritual for camels: a herder, most often a woman, sings a monotonous song to a female camel, sometimes to the sound of a horse-head fiddle or a flute, so that she accepts a newborn or orphaned calf. In 2015 UNESCO inscribed this ritual on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.