anon6789 OP , 8 hours ago

Here’s a good one from Al Jazeera.

7 Apr 2015

The massive decline in the vulture population across Mumbai and the entire Maharashtra state began from 1992-93 onwards when the Indian government opened this drug for use in livestock as well. Today, there is not a single vulture in the state, according to Rahmani.

“Diclofenac is lethal to vultures. It does not matter from where they get it, from a dead Parsi or from a dead cow,” Rahmani said.

As corpses take longer, sometimes eight weeks, to decompose fully, the tower of silence continues to be a scene of partially decomposed bodies.

This has pushed some of the Parsi elders to blend the ritual of “sky burials” with modern technology.

“For 800 deaths a year, we need at least 250 vultures. But since there are no vultures around, we’ve installed solar concentrators. I think that’s the only way out now,” Dinshaw Rusi Mehta, a member the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, told Al Jazeera.