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In a plot twist worthy of reality TV, over 40 camels were disqualified from Saudi Arabia’s prestigious beauty pageant for indulging in a little too much… enhancement – AKA, Botox injections, lip fillers, and other cosmetic tweaks.

This isn’t just any pageant. It’s a highlight of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, boasting a jaw-dropping $66 million (well over R1 billion!) prize pool. The stakes are high, and so are the standards, with key camel features coveted by the judges being long, sultry lips, a prominent nose, and a perfectly shaped hump—basically, the ultimate camel runway look.

But this year, the judging panel wasn’t taking any chances. Armed with “advanced” technology, they uncovered tampering at a scale never seen before, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

Here’s how the camel crackdown unfolded: Contestants were herded into a hall for a thorough once-over, where specialists examined their movements and external beauty. Next, the pageant upped the ante with X-rays, 3D ultrasounds, and even genetic testing, ensuring no hump went unscanned and no wrinkle unbotoxed.

And so begins the beauty drama. In the Majaheim camel category alone, 27 contestants were disqualified for sporting suspiciously stretched body parts, while another 16 were shown the door for dabbling in injections.

The organisers of the pageant, the Camel Club, were cited as saying that they were “keen to halt all acts of tampering and deception in the beautification of camels” and promising to “impose strict penalties on manipulators”, per the BBC.

They described how Botox was injected into camels’ lips, noses, jaws and other parts of their heads to relax muscles; collagen fillers were used to make their lips and noses bigger; and hormones were given to boost muscle growth.
Rubber bands were also used on animals to make body parts bigger than normal by restricting the flow of blood, they said.

Apparently, in the high-stakes world of camel glamour, even desert royalty can’t resist the allure of a little “enhancement.”

Cue the animal rights advocates. Jason Baker, senior vice president of animal rights group Peta Asia, described the beauty contest as a “cruel farce”.

“Subjecting any animal to a cosmetic procedure, from ear cropping to declawing, dehorning, and filler injections, is hideously cruel and shows the humans who use such tactics to be extremely ugly,” he said.

Baker said animal welfare issues needed to be addressed throughout the Middle East and Asia and called on Saudi authorities to crack down on any event that exploits or abuses animals.

The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival is a global spectacle, boasting participation from 33,000 camel owners hailing from as far afield as the US, Russia, and France – yep, this 40-day extravaganza is the largest of its kind in the world.

Held on a sprawling 32 sq km site, just 100km north-east of Riyadh, the festival draws a daily crowd of up to 100,000 tourists. With stakes this high and a worldwide audience, it’s no wonder the competition is fierce—and occasionally, a little too enhanced for its own good.

[source:bbc]