OK, pop quiz, what country has the most camels? Hint, it is the same country that plans on machine gunning its surplus.

Australian authorities plan to corral about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small Outback town in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies.

The Northern Territory government announced its plan Wednesday for Docker River, a town of 350 residents where thirsty camels have been arriving daily for weeks because of drought conditions in the region.

“The community of Docker River is under siege by 6,000 marauding, wild camels,” local government minister Rob Knight said in Alice Springs, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of Docker. “This is a very critical situation out there, it’s very unusual and it needs urgent action.”

Holy buffalo, batman, how is it possible (given all the hungry people out there) that a surplus of food, or potential food, is a problem? And talk about going from one extreme to the other, Catalina will spend 10’s of thousands on relocation and birth control but no 50 cents for a rifle cartridge, Australia decides to go “Rambo”, foregoing all the niceties of being humane or even practical, and will turkey shoot the whole lot. You think, maybe some hungry aborigines can at least harvest the meat from there?

The government plans to use helicopters to herd the camels about nine miles (15 kilometers) outside of town next week, where they will be shot and their carcasses left to decay in the desert.

Conservation fail.

The travesty about this whole situation is two fold: this problem did not just happen over night, and camel burgers happen to be quite tasty.

Suffering from a record setting drought, it is understandable that the out of control camels need to be culled, and I guess sniping them from up above in one way, but can’t these camels be harvested, turned into something useful like food?

Camels also made climate change worse by burping up greenhouse gases and turning various landscapes into deserts.

Ahhh, we might be getting to the heart of the matter, no sympathy is deserved for that which contributes to global warming, lousy burping camels.

It is situations like this that shake my faith in God’s decision to allow man to be stewards of his greatest creation, we don’t seem quite up to the task.