Cultural Relativism, or Botox for Camels…

As long as you don’t actually stop and think about it to deeply, the stuff you grow up with – the food, speech patterns, customs, entertainments, sports, celebrations, religious dogma – are pretty much accepted as normal. The other guy’s, well, they’re just plain weird. How could anyone eat/say/do that?

So for Americans, a bunch of primped-out dogs being paraded around at the American Kennel Club, while you might not do it to your puppy, is fine and dandy. Dogs are man’s best friend. They’re members of the family. They’re the absolute best. Just don’t think about some of the destructive breeding, absurd grooming, and arbitrary judging that goes into the big dog shows, and it’s all good.

But when we read about Saudi Arabia holding a beauty pageant for camels, well…

The word ‘odd’ certainly comes to mind – even by the standards of a country that just decided that it’s be okay for women to drive. (And while on the subject of Saudi weirdness. How come the men get to wear light-reflecting, somewhat cooling white robes, while women have to wear light-absorbing, sweltering, smothering black robes?)

Anyway, it’s not enough that the Saudis run a beauty pageant for camels. What just happened is that a dozen of the contestants in this week’s pageant have been disqualified for using Botox.

Okay, the camels didn’t voluntarily inject Botox to make themselves more appealing. Vets working for the camels’ owners did.

Saudi media reported that a veterinarian was caught performing plastic surgery on the camels a few days before the pageant, according to UAE's The National. In addition to the injections, the clinic was surgically reducing the size of the animals' ears to make them appear more delicate.

"They use Botox for the lips, the nose, the upper lips, the lower lips and even the jaw," Ali Al Mazrouei, a regular at such festivals and the son of a prominent Emirati breeder, told the newspaper. "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.'” (Source: NPR)

There is, of course, something innately humorous about camels. They’re just goofy. Up close and personal they may well be nasty. (They spit, don’t they?) But they’re absolutely so goofily cute that it’s hard to take them all that seriously. Nonetheless, they’re obviously serious to the Saudis, who have laid out some obviously serious objectives for their festival:

1. To accentuate and enhance camel tradition in the Saudi, Arab, and Islamic culture.
2. To provide an integrated economic system in terms of auctions, supplies and industries related to camels and the to develop revenues for community..
3. To achieve regional and global leadership and to establish the festival as the most prominent international forum on camels.
4. To provide a cultural, touristic, sporting, recreational and economic platform for camels and their heritage.’

I’m guessing they’ve got a lock on achieving their third objective of becoming “the most prominent international forum on camels.” Name another…

The Saudis, by the way, don’t just have objectives. They’ve got rules, including banning the use of tribal slurs. So it’s not just camel Botox that’s verboten.

And it’s not just the Camel Beauty Pageant that they’ve got going. There’s the Camel Obedience Competition. And the Don’t Throw Away Plastic Bags Initiative.

Meanwhile, given that we’re talking Saudis here, there’s actually a boatload – make that a camel caravan-load – at stake. I don’t know what winning any individual event is worth – would the Don’t Throw Away Plastic Bags Initiative pay anything – but the over purse for the event is $57million, of which more than half goes to pageant winners. Thus the impulse to cheat with the Botox.

As I said, the other guy’s culture is generally capital-W-Weird.

Which means that someone in Riyadh is probably reading out the Baseball Hall of Fame voting and nodding in agreement (or shake their head) that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, both known as PED users, didn’t make the cut and won’t be inducted this year. Baseball, they’re no doubt saying, what an odd little sport. It’s no camel racing, that’s for sure. It’s not even a plastic bag initiative. And it’s one thing to try to make your camel more beautiful by using Botox – who wouldn’t want that? – but injecting yourself with steroids so you can hit a ball farther and throw a ball harder? What is up with these crazy Americans.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to be chortling away about the despoiling of this year’s camel beauty pageant.

And all I can say is that there’s always something in the news.