Photo: FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty
It wasn’t a happy Hump Day for some camel breeders in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported Wednesday thatmore than 40 camelswere disqualified from a beauty contest at the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival for receiving Botox injections and other artificial physical enhancements ahead of the event, according to The Associated Press.
Saudi authorities told the state-run news agency that the bust was the biggest of its kind.
“The club is keen to halt all acts of tampering and deception in the beautification of camels,” said the SPA report, which noted that organizers would “impose strict penalties on manipulators,” per The AP.
Some breeders used fillers for facial relaxation and hormones to exaggerate muscles on their camels. Other violations included stretching out the lips and noses of some camels and embellishing certain body parts with rubber bands.
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Botox wasdeemed an illegal advantageafter an incident in 2018, where contest officials discovered a dozen camels had received Botox injections to enhance their appearance.
“The camel is a symbol of Saudi Arabia,” the show’s chief judge, Fawzan al-Madi, said to Reuters at the time. “We used to preserve it out of necessity, now we preserve it as a pastime.”
source: people.com
