Why Not Eat The Camel???

In the book, the camel was already dead when Towns and Moran came to see what happened to the Arabs and Capt. Harris. They note the camel's hump was shrunken and that it had been ridden hard and it's store of fat was gone. They also note slashes in its neck indicating that the Arabs had been drinking its blood for sustenance. They remark that even the Arabs were lost/without water. Moran and Towns cover the dead bodies with sand.

Moran then takes Towns' water bottle and begins to open the camel's stomach, filling the water bottle with liquid from the camel's stomach (yech). He plans to dump it into the water tank.

A couple days later, Crow and Bellamy take the still and go to the site. They plan to drain the dead camel's blood and distill water out of it (yech, again.) They even killed a couple vultures and drained their blood as well. The blood didn't work as they only distilled a few drops of sickening black sludge from it.

Then the book says that they knew they couldn't eat the camel flesh either - one mouthful of cooked meat and their thirst would have been 10 times worse.

Hope this helps someone!