Scandal has rocked the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Rumah, Saudi Arabia, after at least 12 of the gorgeous animals were discovered to have artificially boosted their stunning good looks with Botox.
As the New York Times reports, judges in the camel beauty pageant, which attracted over 30,000 camels this year, are looking for “long, wide necks, broad cheeks, a shapely hump and drooping lips“, and some nefarious camel breeders are resorting to dirty tricks to make theirs the hottest.
Ali al-Mazrouei, a leading camel breeder’s son, told United Arab Emirates newspaper The National that they use it to fill out the camel’s features:
They use Botox for the lips, the nose, the upper lips, the lower lips and even the jaw,” Ali al-Mazrouei, the son of a leading Emirati camel breeder, said in an interview with the United Arab Emirates newspaper The National.
It makes the head more inflated so when the camel comes, it’s like, ‘Oh, look at how big that head is. It has big lips, a big nose.’
It might seem kinda trivial (and mostly pretty weird), but the pageant is worth big bucks. The festival proper is a month long, attracting over 300,000 visitors, and offers a total pool prize of $70.4 million AUD – a huge $39.2 million AUD of that going to the pageant, with the rest going to races and other competitions. A lot of money in hot camels, apparently.
The camels found to have been infringing the rules have been disqualified.
