Got (camel) milk?

It’s a central question to Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, who's spent much of the past 25 years trying to preserve and champion the camel-herding lifestyles of rural India’s seminomadic Raikas.

Trained as a veterinary surgeon, Köhler-Rollefson was drawn to camels after encountering herders in Jordan. A research fellowship to study camel socioeconomics and management systems took her to remote Rajasthan, where pastoralists have herded camels for centuries. But their traditional way of life and cultural identity has been usurped by disappearing grazing lands, mechanized farming, parasitic disease, and decimated demand for camels. In Rajasthan their numbers have dropped from about a million in the 1990s to about 200,000 today.

"I was enchanted by the intimate relationship between the camels and