In the desert culture of Oman, camels are more than a transport system, camels are status, heritage, used for health products – especially their milk, and sometimes camels are beauty queens. But at this year’s 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa in Oman, judges had to disqualify some of the contestants for the enhancements used to look their best.

Some 20 camels were disqualified by contest inspectors who found cosmetic enhancements used on the camels including Botox, dermal fillers, hyaluronic acid injections, and silicone used to inflate humps or alter facial features or the skin on the camels neck. Maybe one day the same beauty standards will be applied to women who undergo insane procedures to enhance their looks.

Related: the benefits of camel milk

We wrote about Botox on camels in 2018 at Saudi Arabian festivals and the practice hasn’t stopped. Camel beauty competitions judge animals on a variety of measures such as coat shine, neck strength, head shape and the size and symmetry of their humps. Winning camels, and those with the longest lashes and fullest lips, can increase their value by the thousands when used in breeding markets.

Festival organizers say they are starting to take a serious stance and are cracking down on beauty forgery and use X-rays and scans to see what Botox can’t hide: the beauty under the skin.

The stakes for beautiful camels are high. Some camels can fetch millions of dollars in prizes, including pageants at the Saudi Arabian King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, where similar cosmetic cheating has led to disqualifications in past years.

Festival organizers have said they are working to halt “all acts of tampering and deception in the beautification of camels,” adding that they would impose “strict penalties on manipulators” going forward.

Veterinarians and animal-welfare advocates warn that injecting camels with cosmetic substances can cause pain, infection and long-term health complications. In some cases the animal body parts are plumped by elastic bands that restrict blood flow and which can cause animal suffering and pain.

In Saudi Arabian camel contests that fetch prizes worth $60 million USD, owners are also required to swear on the Quran that they are telling the truth about camel appearance and ownership. Judges report that this is proving to be the best tactic to weed out cheaters.

In the desert, it seems even camels are not immune to the global pressure to look perfect. What’s worse is it’s a form of animal abuse, and such critiques should be passed on to people choosing wives, even if you don’t have to trade a certain number of camels to get one.

The post Botoxed camels disqualified at beauty pageant appeared first on Green Prophet.

The post Camels make a comeback in Iran appeared first on Green Prophet.

Most people in the developing world need to produce their own food, and most of these people do it inefficiently, making food security far out of reach. People buy a cow, or camels for milk, goats or even sheep to get a daily, fresh supply of dairy. There is virtually no way to preserve it using refrigeration and boiling, or pasteurization, because it is too costly.

And think about all the crazy people going off grid. They too need a cheap and simple, low in energy way to save precious resources milked at the farmstead. Can a simple solar-based solution replace the fridge?

Related: This farmer swears he can milk his billy goat

New, cost-effective answers lie in a simple and shocking technology. Researchers from Tel Aviv University have shown that simple electric pulses, in a process called electroporation, can kill the bacteria that contaminate milk. The process kills bacteria dead and the researcher of the study, Alexander Golberg, says this process can prolong milk’s shelf life.

“We are on a constant hunt for new, low-cost, chemical-free technologies for milk preservation, especially for small farmers in low-income countries,” says Golberg. “For 1.5 billion people without adequate access to electricity, refrigeration is simply not a possibility and boiling does not preserve milk’s freshness over time.”

According to the study, pulsed electric fields, an emerging technology in the food industry that has been shown to effectively kill multiple food-born microorganisms, could provide an alternative, non-thermal pasteurization process.

The stored milk is periodically exposed to high-voltage, short pulsed electric fields that kill the bacteria. The energy required can come from conventional sources or even come from the sun. The technology is three times more energy-efficient than boiling and almost twice as energy efficient as refrigeration.

An alternative for poorer countries

In developed countries, bacterial growth in milk is managed with refrigeration. But certain pathogens like listeria monocytogenes are less sensitive to low temperature so can proliferate during transportation and in storage. “Refrigeration slows the bacteria’s metabolism, but pulsed electric fields kill them,” says Golberg. “They are a fundamentally different approach to controlling microorganisms during storage.

“Our model shows that pulsed electric fields preservation technology does not require a constant electricity supply; it can be powered for only 5.5 hours a day using small, family scale solar panels,” he says. “I believe that this technology can provide a robust, simple, and energy-efficient milk preservation system that would decrease the amount of wasted milk, thus increasing the income of small farmers in developing countries.”

Image of goat milk via shutterstock

The post Shocking new way to preserve dairy, without a fridge appeared first on Green Prophet.

At the time of the Bible as described or long after? New clues from Tel Aviv University challenge the Book.

Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob in the Bible. But archaeologists have shown that camels were not domesticated in the Land of Israel until centuries after the Age of the Patriarchs (2000-1500 BCE). In addition to challenging the Bible’s historicity, this anachronism is proof that the text was compiled after the events it describes, according to researchers. 

Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen from Tel Aviv University have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the moment when domesticated camels arrived in the southern Levant, pushing the estimate from the 12th to the 9th century BCE, according to them.

The findings, published recently in the journal Tel Aviv, further emphasize the disagreements between Biblical texts and verifiable history, and define a turning point in Israel’s engagement with the rest of the world.

I would like to point out that Tel Aviv University swings very much to the left so much to the point where they go out of their way to disprove biblical texts. This is in direct contrast to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a right-wing university which swings in the other direction.

“The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development,” said Ben-Yosef in a press release. “By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries.”

Copper mining and camel riding

Archaeologists have established that camels were probably domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In the southern Levant, where Israel is located, the oldest known domesticated camel bones are from the Aravah Valley, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and was an ancient center of copper production.

At a 2009 dig, Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found to the 11th to 9th century BCE. In 2013, he led another dig in the area.

To determine exactly when domesticated camels appeared in the southern Levant, Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to analyze the findings of these digs as well as several others done in the valley. In all the digs, they found that camel bones were unearthed almost exclusively in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BCE or later — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible.

The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think were in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period or even earlier. Notably, all the sites active in the 9th century in the Arava Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.

The appearance of domesticated camels in the Aravah Valley appears to coincide with dramatic changes in the local copper mining operation. Many of the mines and smelting sites were shut down; those that remained active began using more centralized labor and sophisticated technology, according to the archaeological evidence. The researchers say the ancient Egyptians may have imposed these changes — and brought in domesticated camels — after conquering the area in a military campaign mentioned in both biblical and Egyptian sources.

Humping it to India

The origin of the domesticated camel is probably the Arabian Peninsula, which borders the Aravah Valley and would have been a logical entry point for domesticated camels into the southern Levant. In fact, Dr. Ben-Yosef and Dr. Sapir-Hen say the first domesticated camels ever to leave the Arabian Peninsula may now be buried in the Aravah Valley.

The arrival of domesticated camels promoted trade between Israel and exotic locations unreachable before, according to the researchers; the camels can travel over much longer distances than the donkeys and mules that preceded them.

By the seventh century BCE, trade routes like the Incense Road stretched all the way from Africa through Israel to India. Camels opened Israel up to the world beyond the vast deserts, researchers say, profoundly altering its economic and social history.

Tony Moran / Shutterstock.com

The post Camel domestication research challenges Bible’s origins appeared first on Green Prophet.

Last week Green Prophet’s Maurice spotted an abused camel used for tourist rides in Jerusalem. Chained to a pole to walk around in its own faeces, his article led to a bigger feature story in a local Israeli paper Maariv (links to Hebrew version of story). He wasn’t the only local to spot the camel. A reader sends us this after seeing the story:

“Regarding the abused camel on Mount Olives, I have photographed the same camel over the past few years, the last shot I got of him, he had sores on his face, was frothing at the mouth and looked thin and neglected. I believe that this is really one very neglected and abused camel,” writes Rimonah Traub, an amateur photographer who runs the photoblog website Israel Camera Focus.

The next step is to know what the local animal authorities are going to do to help this abused creature.

Catch something fishy or suspicious on film? Want to report an animal abuse or an environmental problem? Send us your tips to tips@greenprophet.com. We will give full credit, or full anonymity to the sender.

The post Sad and Abused Jerusalem Camel Caught on Film Again appeared first on Green Prophet.

Nature has been developing solutions to its own challenges for the last 3.8 billion years, so two women in Egypt have set up an eco-tourism venture that tunes into that infinite wisdom. Biologists Sara el-Sayed and Betty Khoury decided to start their own business after last year’s revolution made their previous jobs obsolete.

Dayma offers guided journeys to many of Egypt’s less-explored locations and last up to 10 days. But here’s the most interesting aspect of their “everlasting, enduring, or sustainable” tours: instead of trooping with the throng to the same old historical destinations, Dayma focuses on biomimicry – “an alternative manner of development that harmonizes with natural processes.”

The Camel

Tourists who walk on sand dunes sink in the sand, hobbling along as though their legs are two different lengths. Yet camels cruise along without skipping a beat. How is this possible? What do camels have that we don’t and what can we learn from their special adaptations?

“The camel could teach us how to walk on soft sandy surfaces,” Sara el-Sayed told Green Prophet, adding that we could “maybe look at its three eyelids that create a super barrier to deal with sand storms, as well as the nostrils that seal off completely.”

We could “even learn from them based on the plants they eat to heal themselves,” el-Sayed said, adding that this “is actually already done by local Bedouins.”

Youth who have been on a Dayma tour have come up with their own creative solutions to problems based on what they have observed in nature.

Sara explained that after observing a horned viper whose jaw actually separates when eating its prey, the elastic skin stretching to accommodate the jaw’s expansion, one student proposed to develop a fabric that has a similar capability. That way, according to the student, clothing manufacturers would be able to make all outfits one size.

The Scorpion

Although a “one-size-fits-all” stretchy fabrics may be a bit far-fetched, more realistic ideas have also come from Dayma tours, which support local communities as far as possible. If el-Sayed and Khoury are unable to find eco-lodges for their guests, they will source the next best option to ensure that their presence is genuinely advantageous.

“Due to its skin having a certain texture that allows it to withstand sandstorms and abrasiveness, the scorpion could teach us to create materials that could be placed on photovoltaic panels so they aren’t ruined with time, or even on a simpler scale non-scratch glass that could withstand a sandstorm,” el-Sayed explains.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Although the desert looks like a vast, unforgivable place sans life, there are all kinds of fauna and flora and humans that survive their using innovative tricks.

Many Egyptians who live in urban areas lead a sedentary life that keeps them alienated from natural processes, but a steady increase of eco-tours, sustainably built lodges, and even creative urban farming initiatives are slowly bringing the green back into their lives. As for tourists, it’s high time they demand more than the tired and overrun packaged tours of old.

More on Eco-Tourism in Egypt:

Is Troubled Egypt Ready for Eco-Tourism?

New El Mandara Eco-Haven Pops up in Fayoum, Egypt

Tourists Bust Egyptian Tourism Operators Serving Endangered Species

The post What Camels and Scorpions Teach “Dayma” Tourists in Egypt appeared first on Green Prophet.