These days, as it has been for a while, the news does not stop being depressing and most of the time even tragic: pandemic raging on, migrants drowning, superpower bickering while the Earth is dying, and so on and so on. Only the rich and the powerful are having fun and even increasing their hold. So I have decided to write about something fun or I should say funny. And I found it … I think.
You may remember one of my early posts (March 15, 2021) about remote-controlled camel racing. Now I have camel Botox cheating for a beauty contest, a camel beauty contest.
You see, camels in Saudi Arabia rule de deserts and you have many contests, competitions, and races with camels. Apparently, there are a number of camel beauty contests, and why not, we have dog beauty contests in the West.
One of the most popular festivals in the Kingdom, the King Abdulaziz festival, which lasts about a month and among other event has a camel beauty contest, invites the breeders to compete for a total prize of $66 million. As the Guardian article (see the link below) writes, “Jurors decide the winner based on the shape of the animals’ heads, necks, humps, dress, and postures.” And as you would expect, when money (especially lots of it) and people are involved, there will surely be cheating.
This year, apparently the Saudi officials and police rounded and disqualified 40 “enhanced” camels from the annual competition. As the same Guardian article writes, “The camels disqualified in the competition, at the King Abdulaziz camel festival, were judged to have received Botox injections and other artificial touch-ups”. The article gives further details, that “judges … are escalating their clampdown on artificially enhanced camels, using ‘specialized and advanced’ technology to detect tampering. It gives further details that “this year, the authorities discovered dozens of breeders had stretched out the lips and noses of camels, used hormones to boost the animals’ muscles, injected heads and lips with Botox to make them bigger, inflated body parts with rubber bands, and used fillers to relax their faces.”
I wonder if some local Start-up has turned unicorn (defined as a tech startup valued $1billion or more) through developing Artificial Intelligence based apps that detect such frauds?
The Guardian article on cheating in the camel beauty contest
Paris December 9, 2021,
Zeejay