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Why Do Camels Spit?

No idea how I wound up on this question, but that’s probably true of 95% of the stuff I google, so let’s just get right to it… why do camels spit!?!?

Well, the short answer is that they don’t. So you might be thinking, “hmm… I wonder where I got that crazy misconception? I guess I don’t have to worry about that next time I’m around a camel.” But the long answer is that what they actually do is a lot grosser.

Hey, I'm a camel, and I'm disgusting.

Apparently, when camels “spit,” what they are actually doing is a lot closer to vomiting. Camels are ruminants, which means something, but I don’t know what, and I didn’t really feel like googling that at the time. Anyway, they are similar to cows in that way and this means that when they get agitated they will burp up some of their cud (or semi-digested contents of their fore-stomach). They then flap their head to get some of that good cud onto their bottom droopy lip which they then fling into the air. Impressively enough, using this technique, they can apparently cover the upper half of a human.

I was hoping to really delve into their psyches and find what kind of trauma caused them to be so gross, but I didn’t really get that information. Evidently they don’t do this to humans much, but that doesn’t change the fact that they still leapfrogged bullfrogs in my most feared animals list.

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