A Bird of Passage

It’s rarely a good sign when the vultures are circling. But it turns out that it’s an even worse sign if the vultures aren’t circling. It’s all related to the circle of life. A few decades ago, farmers in India started using an inexpensive drug to reduce pain and inflammation in livestock. What they didn’t realized at the time was that the drug, passed through the food chain, would have a deadly effect on Vultures for whom the remnants of the drug caused kidney failure. Tens of millions of the birds died. But that’s not where the cycle ended. “Quickly, it became obvious that India was dependent on vultures to clean up the millions of carcasses of cows, sheep and other livestock animals that died each year across the country. Without the infrastructure to incinerate and otherwise process carcasses, the shock of the sudden vulture collapse led to animal bodies quickly piling up. A public health emergency followed, the depth of which researchers are just now starting to understand.” Ian Rose in WaPo (Gift Article) with a bird’s eye view of our interdependence in The hidden value of vultures: How a massive die-off of birds led to massive rise in human deaths.