Cleaning Up: Vultures in India
A little teeny consequence of eating is that it produces tons of of garbage. There’s the regular garbage, of course. But that’s just the beginning. There are all the stalks of the grain we eat. Do we burn them, plow them under, or compost them? There’s the urine and excrement of the animals we eat (quite a political issue in those American states that have huge barns of chicken or pigs) . There is human urine and excrement. And there are dead bodies.
Not, perhaps, the sexiest of subjects. But intriguing nonetheless. So I latched on to an article in the Economist (week of 6th of October).
In 1990 India was home to 200 million cattle and between 20 and 40 million vultures. Or roughly for every seven cattle, there was one vulture. Those vultures , their bad name notwithstanding, did a terrific job. When cattle died, farmers left them where they lay. The vultures stripped the carcass of every dead bovine within the day, preventing goodness knows what horrid diseases.
Then in the 1980s, diclotenac, previously used for kidney disease in humans was given to cattle. The carrion killed vultures. Today instead of 10 or 20 million there are a mere 10,000 vultures.
It’s an ill wind. Feral dogs and rats are having a heyday feasting on cattle carcasses. In hindsight vultures look a lot better than dogs and rats.
The Bombay Natural History Society has set up a breeding facility. But it’s working with only a little over a hundred vultures.
First in the fascinating series of the back end of eating.
