Recently, the annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia started again.


This is a traditional festival that started more than 20 years ago, and now it has developed into the largest camel festival in the world.


Thousands of people come to the desert town of Rumah, east of the capital Riyadh, to experience the local traditional culture. The Camel Festival usually lasts for a month, during which people can watch camel racing and experience Saudi folk art, music, and literature.


The most popular part of this festival is the camel beauty contest, which is also the highlight of the whole camel festival.


Every year, tens of thousands of well-groomed camels are brought to the competition by breeders from all over Saudi Arabia.


Finally, the jury selected the most beautiful camel in the Saudi desert this year.


It is worth mentioning that the prize money of the camel beauty contest is also surprisingly high. The winner can actually get a bonus of up to 66 million US dollars.


In Saudi Arabia, raising a camel is like buying a lottery ticket. If his camel won the championship in the beauty pageant, he would immediately become a billionaire.


However, before the beauty pageant officially started this year, a scandal was exposed.


Local media broke the news that more than 40 camels were disqualified from the competition. The reason turned out to be that they had plastic surgery!


It turned out that some camel breeders spent a lot of money on camels in order to win huge prizes!


Some camels had Botox on their heads and lips. Some had facelifts, and others had growth hormone injections.


Botox was injected to make their heads look better and their lips fuller. The use of growth hormones can make their muscles look more developed.


In camel beauty pageants, judges score the camels by their heads, neck length, humps, clothing, and how they look on catwalks.


The size of the camel's nose and lips is also very important, and they think that the camel with a longer nose and thicker lips is more beautiful.


In order to win the favor of the judges, some camel breeders have plastic surgery on their camels before the beauty pageant.


In fact, cosmetic surgery and make-up on camels have always been explicitly prohibited in camel beauty pageants.


And if violations are found, they will be disqualified from the competition.


Every year some camels are disqualified due to cosmetic surgery. For example, 12 camels with facelifts were also found in the 2018 beauty pageant.


Some breeders this year thought they could get away with it. But this time the competition judges used "specialized advanced technology" to intensify the investigation and punishment of camel plastic surgery, and strive to make the competition fairer.


The organizers thought they wanted camels that showed their natural beauty so that the pageant would make sense.


In addition to being unfair to other breeders, cosmetic surgery on camels has actually caused harm to camels. The mild ones disfigure them, and the severe ones may kill them.


For example, in a video that went viral in Saudi Arabia in August, Aa camel's lip became inflamed after being injected with too much Botox. In the end, the entire upper lip burst opens into a large wound bloody.


The camel would not be able to eat or drink unless it was rescued. In the video, its eyes seemed to be filled with tears, and it was hard to imagine how painful it was.


In order to satisfy human desires, this poor camel paid a heavy price.


The Saudi Press Agency also issued an article saying: "This conference will be dedicated to stopping all deceptions that glorify camels."


Not only will the convention disqualify them from the competition, but they will also "fine the offending breeders".


One of the judges also criticized this cruel practice, saying: "Our camels are not Bollywood actresses."