A “beauty pageant” in Saudia Arabia has disqualified 40 camels from the contest after it emerged that their owners used botox and other cosmetic supplements to beautify the animals. The contest is a highlight of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, where $66m (£45m) in prize money is at stake.
According to the report, camels are judged on the basis of physical attributes, including long droopy lips, a big nose and a nicely-shaped hump.
Judges employed some advanced technology to figure out whether the animals are naturally beautiful or have their features been artificially enhanced, the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
All the camels participating in the contest were first taken to a hall where professional experts inspected their external appearance and movements to check out if they were healthy.
Later on, samples were taken from the animals for examination, while their torsos, necks, and heads were scanned with X-ray and 3D ultrasound machines.
Twenty-seven contestants in the cup for Majaheim camels alone were unfit for having stretched body parts and 16 were put out for receiving injections, according to SPA. The owners of camels in Saudi Arabia have been caught enhancing their animals’ looks for a beauty contest.
The organisers of the pageant, the Camel Club, mentioned 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”.
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 to stop the flow of blood, they said.
Some 33,000 camel owners from as far away as the US, Russia and France are participating in the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, which is the largest in the world and lasts 40 days.
As many as 100,000 tourists are also expected daily at the event.
