Camel racing, a multimillion dollar industry in the Gulf, is getting a facelift. Long vilified by human rights groups for the use of children as jockeys (adults are too heavy), countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are taking steps to substitute technology for human labor.
This has been an ongoing story. Little Green Footballs blogged about it last December and NatGeo wrote about it this past July. Yesterday the WSJ ran an article about it. Since it's the rich man's paper there's probably a subscription required so you'll have to search online or look at the aforementioned entries if you want to learn more.
From the Journal:
Two years ago, Swiss robotics company
K-Team SA received a curious email from the state of Qatar about camel
racing. It landed on the desk of Alexandre Colot, who had never heard
of camel racing. He needed a map to find Qatar.
Yet here was the tiny desert state asking his company to help save its national pastime by designing a robotic camel jockey.
The camel-racing world in Qatar, an island
nation in the Persian Gulf, was on the brink of turmoil. Although a
minimum age of 15 years for jockeys was set in 1980 across the Gulf,
antislavery groups estimate that thousands of underage jockeys are
still used in the region. Children as young as four are bought from
impoverished parents or simply kidnapped in countries like India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Two years ago the U.S. State Department
and human-rights groups began sharply criticizing the use of children
as jockeys, and last year the United Nations urged prosecution of
adults involved in it. Qatar, along with the United Arab Emirates,
raised the minimum age to 18, and have expressed a new determination to
enforce it.
The robots weigh 59 lbs and cost about $5,500 each. Since some races have grand prizes as high as $250,000, the cost of the robots should not be prohibitive. The first robots will make their debut when the racing season begins later this month.
Of course, this isn't exactly new either. From the '87 times (
SCOUTING;Ride 'em, Robot! The New York Times February 5, 1987, Thursday):
Horse racing at Madison Square Garden may sound farfetched. After all,
1,200-pound thoroughbreds are obviously too big for the arena, and such
scaled-down mounts as 500-pound hackney ponies are too little to make
any speed while carrying 120-pound jockeys.
But
suppose someone developed a 22-pound, radio-controlled robot jockey
capable of guiding high-spirited hackneys four times around a 440-foot
oval at speeds not much slower than those of a trotter. Still strike
you as farfetched? Well, maybe so, but a Missouri ranch manager, Dave
Kime, has invented just such a jockey, and the ranch's owner, Charles
McKean, a Memphis commodity trader, has invested $2 million in
perfecting the device and turning out four dozen working models. Not
only that, but a group of investors - led by a Missouri businessman,
Donald Teague, and armed with a videotape of an exhibition race held at
the Birmingham-Jefferson Coliseum in Alabama last year - say they're
well on their way to holding the first robot-ridden-hackney racing
season at Kemper Arena in Kansas City this summer
My only worry is what will happen to the children now that they are not working. While it is easy to condemn child labor, we should be hesitant to celebrate too early. My hunch is that kidnappings will not end and that many children, instead of working, will find themselves in even less attractive occupations (prostitution?) under much worse conditions. Let's hope the home countries can find a way to keep their children in school and safe from any more harm.
(Photograph by Karim Jaafar, AFP/Getty Images)
