All great points here. I often wondered also why the hell they didn't cook that camel in a great desert BBQ, complete with pressed dates!? Yes, they could have distilled the camel blood for water. I think the best explanation is no need to burden the plot down with unnecessary details, but someone else was right in that the issue should have at least been addressed and explained why there was no need for it.

Could have still carved out a hind quarter
You don't have to stand tall, but you have to stand up!

Once the camel was shot all about the body, likely rupturing the intestines, the meat had a good chance of being tainted. Had he just shot it in the head/upper chest cavity it could have been butchered.

The doctor was dead by the time the camel made its appearance, but you are right: Dorfmann or Towns could easily have explained it. I suppose the writers simply figured that the audience would know that food wasn't an important consideration under those circumstances.

That's an interesting point you make about water needed for digestion of protein. Maybe someone as logical as Dorfmann might have thought of it too, but I doubt the other characters would. I think the relevence to survival of a camel's fresh corpse was sufficiently pertinent for the subject to have been addressed in the movie. There was a doctor amongst the passengers, and he could perhaps have offered your explanation.

If they ate the camel they would have used up their precious water supply at an even faster rate. Meat protein requires a lot of water in order to digest it. Add to that the fact that butchering a large animal like a camel is hard work. Why bother doing so? If the Phoenix project succeeds, you'll be out of there in a couple of days. If it fails, you are going to be dying of thirst long before you starve to death. The dates they were eating were enough to keep them going, required no effort to gather, and maybe even contained enough moisture to offset some of the water used in their digestion.

I wondered at this too. It was only lame apparently and not diseased. Much of its meat could have been preserved for ongoing use - hung and dried in the desert wind to make `jerky', or smoked. It also contained about 2 gallons of blood which could have been distilled like the antifreeze to extract water.
Perhaps its buchering was perceived as a bit too savage for audience sensibilities.

high in salt.
His namewas Julio Iglesias!

I would have walked a mile to eat a camel
I don't need you to tell me how good my coffee is.
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