Shaherazad’s unnamed camel was stolen, mutilated and left on the front porch of the Delta Gamma sorority house early Thursday morning.
Shaherazad’s manager Kenny Price said whoever took the camel tore its legs off, cut its throat, gouged out its eyes, ripped its ears off, tore its tail off and stole its bridle.
“They ruined him,” he said. “They absolutely trashed him. There was no sense in that.”
Lisa Dakhlalla, wife of Shaherazad’s owner, Oda, said she was the person who noticed the camel was missing.
“I knew it was there the night before,” Dakhlalla said. “I opened up that morning, and I did kind of a double take and I realized it was gone. I called Kenny so he could get after it and see what was going on.”
Delta Gamma house director Mitsy Bailey said the girls originally did not know how to respond to the camel.
“We were really just like, ‘This is weird,'” she said. “His head was kind of smashed in, and you could tell he had been abused, that he was not in perfect shape.”
She said she eventually called the restaurant.
“All my girls said, ‘That’s the one that sits outside of Shaherazad’s,'” Bailey said. “I called Mr. Price and told him, “‘I think we have something that belongs to you,’ and he was thrilled.”
Price said Bailey called him about 10 a.m. Thursday.
“I assumed that he [the camel] was still in the condition that he was when he left here,” he said.
Bailey said from what she understands, the camel was bolted and chained in place.
“They didn’t just pick it up and walk off with it,” she said. “I know that’s how part of it was destroyed because they had to tear it up to get it.”
She said the sorority house’s surveillance camera shows the camel being placed on the porch around 1:30 a.m. Thursday.
“I called campus police, and they came and took a statement and took a look at our video camera,” Bailey said. “Then Mr. Price called the Starkville city police, and they came out and took pictures and looked at our video camera.”
Dakhlalla said before the camel was discovered she and Price had thought it was a simple prank.
“When I heard it got mutilated, that just broke my heart,” she said. “They didn’t really need to do that.”
Price said the camel was his idea.
“I was thinking of something like the Shoney’s Big Boy that’s in front of Shoney’s and holds up a big platter,” he said.
Price said he remembered his father had a couple prop camels that had once been used in a church Nativity scene.
“The camels have been retired for like five years; they were stored in a barn,” he said.
Price’s father took one of the camel from the barn, wrestored it, brought it to the restaurant and set it up for him.
Bailey said she thought the camel was well crafted.
“[Price] started explaining to me it had some steel parts in it that made it stand erect, and it was formed out of heavy-duty chicken wire, and then it had fake fur sewed over it,” she said. ” I felt really bad for them because it meant a lot to them.”
Price said Shaherazad’s was in the process of holding a contest to name the camel.
“We have a box there with over 600 entries for the name the camel contest,” he said. “We are going to bring out a second camel, redo him and then adjust the contest so we have some sort of name for the first camel, and then officially name the second camel.”
He said he is not exactly sure how the contest will be handled now.
“I think I’m going to extend the contest to the end of October because of this dilemma,” Price said. “It’s going to be the end of the week before the second camel gets here.”