What happened to the circling vultures?
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:
NEW DELHI–“The government is taking its own sweet time in
phasing out a veterinary drug blamed for bringing vultures to the
verge of extinction,” Chandrika Mago of the Times of India news
network charged on September 8, 2004.
Washington State University microbiologist Lindsay Oaks in
January 2003 identified the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac as the
cause of the loss over the past decade of more than 95% of the once
common Oriental white-backed vulture. Also fast declining are
long-billed and slender-billed vultures.
“Vultures have an important ecological role in Asia, where
they have been relied upon for millennia to clean up and remove dead
livestock and even human corpses,” explained Peregrine Fund
biologist Munir Virani when the diclofenac link was disclosed.
“Their loss,” Virani continued, “has important economic,
cultural, and human health consequences,” especially for millions
of Parsees, about 1% of the Indian population, for whom exposing
corpses to consumption by vultures is a religious mandate.
The Bombay Natural History Society warned in February that
continued sale of diclofenac could cause the extinction of Indian
vultures. A similar warning came in June from Samar Singh,
president of the Tourism & Wildlife Society of India. Yet diclofenac
is still in unrestricted over-the-counter veterinary use.