From TA: Historically, vultures were widespread in India. But
between the 1990s and early 2000s their numbers plummeted
by more than 90%, from around 40m. The cause was
diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began
using to treat their cattle. Though the drug was harmless
to both cows and humans, birds that consumed animals
treated with diclofenac suffered from kidney failure and
died within weeks.
According to the article, farmers were treating their cows with an anti-inflammatory drug and vultures then consumed the flesh of medicated cows and died and this was occurring on a large-enough scale to slash the populations of multiple vulture species.The piece doesn't mention why those farmers were frequently administering diclofenac to their cows, how the vultures had been able to access dead cow flesh in large volumes up to that point, or anything about the structure of cow ownership in India. The piece is a monocle-wearing version of a "Banish Chin Wrinkles Forever Using This Weird Trick!" clickbait junk article linked via a photo of a woman holding a bell pepper against one ear and is emblematic of why I personally dislike glorified content mills like The Economist. From what I can ascertain via a quick look around the Internet, in broad strokes, the people using diclofenac on their cows are/were small-holder (as in owning one or two or a handful of cows) dairy farmers who rely on their cows to produce milk that is consumed or used to produce other dairy products largely for their own households and maybe selling or trading a little surplus. They are/were using it treat mastitis. There are alternative NSAIDs (e.g. meloxicam) that are reportedly effective for the same purposes but less toxic to the vultures. I do not know whether alternative NSAIDs are as readily available as diclofenac, which is still available from pharmacies for human use after veterinary use was banned. Cattle in the region could be dosed up to the gills with diclofenac or one of the other toxic-to-vultures NSAIDs without crashing the vulture population, however, if vultures didn't have access to large amounts of dead cow flesh. The slaughter of cows and the operation of slaughterhouses in that part of the world is tied up with religious and political issues unique to the region. You can find articles about the problem if you don't care for this one (from 2016): https://www.thedairysite.com/articles/4310/how-does-indias-s... TLDR: Many sick/dying/knackered cows are abandoned by subsistence/small-scale dairy farmers rather than being slaughtered and processed for meat, leather, etc. and that's how they end up getting consumed by vultures. Larger dairy operations exist and are more able to make arrangements for their animals to be slaughtered, though political opposition and interference was (at least according to thedairysite.com, in 2016) increasing. |