[peanutz454]

Vultures man, those are things that we nearly lead to extinction recently in India. I remember when I was a kid there used to be a road in Delhi with the dead tree and vultures sitting all over it. But by the time I was an adult there were no Vultures in most of India. The heavy use of antibiotics we realised too late was causing the decline. The Parsi people (zorastrians) were impacted badly because their religious practice is to let the body be eaten away by animals, and without vultures the bodies were just rotting very badly.

[jbotz]

What nearly wiped out the vultures wasn't antibiotics... there may be other factors, but the main one was a specific anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) which was used liberally in treating any sign of illness in livestock and which turned out to be highly toxic to vultures. It is now banned in India. The thing about livestock medicine today is that diagnosis is generally too expensive for individual cases... if an animal looks sick you basically give an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic and hope for the best, the former so that it'll feel well enough to eat so it won't get too weak, and the later to hopefully cure the illness. So both anti-inflammatory and antibiotics get used very liberally, to tragic consequences.

[kamaal]

We had a Parsi tower of silence in Bangalore as well. It was in the outskirts back in the day. The city consumed those areas and they are now in the heart of the city. I wonder where the facility is these days.