7 ms·

The sudden demise of Indian vultures killed thousands of people

168 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

1letterunixname 3y ago
https://archive.is/VQ02q https://archive.is/VQ02q
jononomo 3y ago
All the vultures suddenly died because farmers began treating their animals with a new drug that was harmless to the animals, but which was deadly to vultures that ate animals who had been treated with it. After all the vultures died there was less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease. The delicate balance of Nature was upset.
- enjeyw 3y ago
  > The delicate balance of Nature was upset. Fascinating stuff. A subtle build on this that just struck me: "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths" I think it's interesting because it strikes me that Nature is actually a pretty resilient system, it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to human life, to varying degrees. Then again, maybe I'm painting too much of an anthropocentric picture.
  - owlninja 3y ago
    It is incredible how humans are incredibly resilient, but also very fragile.
    - wddkcs 3y ago
      The collective is resilient, it's individuals that perish.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        The collective perishes, it's individuals that persist.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to ~~human~~ life FTFY. We humans are part of nature too.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      FTFY: here’s a nature’s nature article on nature (pun intended) [0]. There’s 4 main definition which are exclusive to each others and guess what, your “fix” is within the same definition as GP: > The whole universe, as it is the place, the source and the result of material phenomena (including man or at least man’s body) Furthermore I think his point wasn’t about the definition of nature but instead going further on the classic argument “nature will be fine”. Of course universe will always be fine! But your descend may not be part of it. So yes, we should preserve the current equilibrium to preserve ourselves and that’s what this article is all about. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0390-y#Tab1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0390-y#Tab1
  - OscarCunningham 3y ago
    I'd add a couple of points: 1. Nature isn't an 'equilibrium' and doesn't have 'stable states'. It's a constantly changing complex system that can produce catastrophic changes without any external triggers. 2. What people view as 'nature' is often itself a situation that humans have created. For example in this post the preexisting situation was vultures feeding on livestock, but the vultures weren't doing that before humans were around.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      Also vulture were probably consuming other mammals before human replace most of them with livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths" As OscarCunningham has pointed out, nature does not have a balance or an equilibrium. That's the concept of "evolution".
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  > less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease The first one, yes, but for the others isn’t it kind of hard to evaluate the counter factual? How do we tease this apart from all the other factors contributing to polluted water and disease?
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  This drug (diclofenac) is partly covered in Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". More here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/arundhati-roy/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/aru... And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
- dxbydt 3y ago
  > The delicate balance of Nature was upset So what ? If Nature is upset you can submit it to Cell or Science. If its of interest to the medical community JAMA or Lancet might pick it up. At a 5% significance level, h-index of Nature is not that much different from these other peer reviewed publications.
- psiops 3y ago
  Not even that delicate, usually quite robust really. The interventions humans throw at it are just too massive.
jzl 3y ago
Paywalled, but there’s a great Radiolab episode about this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Second recommendation. It was an extremely well-done episode. One of those where each rabbit hole leads to an even more interesting rabbit hole, and they're all answered at the end.
  - leoh 3y ago
    They didn’t get into excess human deaths attributed, fwiw
rhaway84773 3y ago
This is an interesting article. One aspect few might notice is that India is also where the largest group of Zoroastrians/Parsis live. This is relevant because parsis dispose their dead not by burial or cremation but by placing them on towers where vultures can consume their bodies. The lack of vultures has been a huge problem for the community. It would be interesting to know if this contributed to that.
- astrange 3y ago
  https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Yes it did. Some Parsis are doing cremations now for this reason.
XargonEnder 3y ago
Perhaps there's a silver lining to this. Maybe the remaining vultures have a resistance to the drug and with an abundance of food they will be able to recover? I don't know any of this I'm just trying to be positive.
- ars 3y ago
  Once the cause was noticed governments were relatively quick at banning Diclofenac and vulture numbers are slowly recovering. Also people are breeding vultures with the intent to release them eventually. (There is still some illegal use of Diclofenac because it's legal for human use and some gets diverted to veterinary use.)
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    Is there any record of the Indian government doing it? Ecological collapses such as this incident are quite serious and it’d make me happy to hear that some action is being taken.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      From the Drug Controller General of India in 2007 (the sources seem to be off by a year, or maybe it's just bureaucracy delays) [1]: > AGENDA ITEM NO.1 > CREATION OF A NEW SCHEDULE-H(1) AND CORRESPONDING CHANGES IN THE RULES UNDER THE DRUGS AND COSMETICS RULES FOR SPECIAL PRODUCTS WHICH ARE REOUIRED TO BE SOLD UNDER SPECIFIED CONDITIONS i.e. DICLOFENAC AND SPECIFYING CONDITIONS FOR SALE OF SUCH PRODUCTS. > DCG(I) explained that at present the sale of drugs is regulated under Schedule-H (prescription drugs), and under Schedule-X {psychotropic or habit forming drugs). A need is, however, being felt that a separate Schedule is required to monitor, control and evaluate sales of certain specific drugs where it is not desirable to allow indiscriminate and unregulated access. Such drugs- would be regulated through a new Schedule i.e. Schedule-H(l). The specific sale conditions for the drug will be notified by the Ministry of Healthand FW through notification. > The committee after deliberations agreed to the creation of a new Schedule-H 1 under the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules which would be strictly monitored by the State drug inspectors with a specific reference to Diclofenac preparations in respect of their veterinary use. The DCC also agreed to the prohibition of Diclofenac preparations for veterinary use. It further recommended that Diclofenac formulations meant for human use will print on their labels “Not for Veterinary Use” [1] https://cdsco.gov.in/opencms/resources/UploadCDSCOWeb/2018/UploadCommitteeFiles/38dcc.pdf https://cdsco.gov.in/opencms/resources/UploadCDSCOWeb/2018/U...
vxNsr 3y ago
The authors estimated an extra 100k deaths/year over 5 years… that’s very striking.
statguy 3y ago
I remember that during the early nineties, when I was kid, I often used to see over a dozen vultures perched on my maternal grandparents’ terrace in New Delhi on summer evenings (I visited them only in summer). A few years later I noticed that I didn’t see them anymore and occasionally wondered why. Then years later I started seeing articles about Diclofenac killing vultures and then it clicked. Just thought I’d share.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bandrami 3y ago
This had a big impact on the Zoroastarian community in Mumbai. They do "sky burials" where they leave remains exposed for the vultures to eat, but with so few vultures left in Maharashtra they had to import hawks.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  there's a good radiolab on that part of this. I wish their search function were better, but here's the episode where they talk about this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
keepamovin 3y ago
This is terrible, but I relate a humorous misreading of the title that occurred just now: "The sudden demise of Indian Ventures killed thousands of startups" Indian Ventures sounds like a legit VC firm in the SW US. On topic tho, it's so weird that diclofenac kills vultures. It's such a useful and good pain-killer. Vultures are super interesting because they are very hardy and resilient to many shall we say "discomforts" that would be lethal (concession for hovering pedants: "exceedingly harmful") for humans. Makes me wonder if there's not some toxicity with diclo that we haven't noticed yet... 2nd order effect related: this is one of the things I'm so worried about when people talk about deliberately biosphere-engineering the extinction of mosquitoes. I know they 'seem a senseless pestilence upon the good Earth', but I think they're kind of vital in the same way. Not as obvious as carrion mungers, but vital non-the-less. If we eradicate them, I see more pandemics (concession for skeptics: I think it's related to immuno-modulation and horizontal gene transfer). Vultures are truly the death-eaters of nature. It's weird that a pain-killer kills them.
- s_dev 3y ago
  Vulture funds are definitely a thing in the financial world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Cool! Yeah, they should just come out and say it: Vulture Ventures, 666 S Sepulveda Blvd
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Unlike the feathered variety, nobody would miss those.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  > I think they're kind of vital in the same way It's just so easy for the people in California to fight for the wellbeing of mosquitoes, hookworms and environment in general. While having an endless summer and highly energy intensive air conditioned environment around you. Not everybody on the planet does. Some people have half a year of winter and half a year of dense mosquito clouds. If only we could give you some for safekeeping.
Wronnay 3y ago
https://archive.li/m4h8E https://archive.li/m4h8E
falloutx 3y ago
Just shows how a small technical change by humans can bring an apocalypse.
myshpa 3y ago
> The cause was diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began using to treat their cattle https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-70-of-animal-populations-wiped-out-since-1970-report-reveals-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7... Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 Humans are driving one million species to extinction https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-approached.html https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap... The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974 More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends .. of 70,000 monitored species, some 48% are experiencing population declines from anthropogenic pressures ... ... global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction The biomass decrease is 80% for marine mammals, 50% for plants and 15% for fish. Currently, livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). As for birds, 70% are domesticated, such as poultry, whereas only 30% are wild. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120 Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
NikhilVerma 3y ago
I remember vividly when going out with my family in the year 2000. There used to be a stretch of road filled with vultures. Then a few years later they just stopped existing. I haven’t seen a real vulture since then.
arp242 3y ago
Reading up on things, it seems these kind of problems also play in Africa, albeit slightly less dramatic and for different reasons (intentional poisoning and hunting seem to be the largest factors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_vulture_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_vulture_crisis
ChoGGi 3y ago
> 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, It isn't harmless to humans, it causes ulcers (if you take a big dose, like the vultures).
briandon 3y ago
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-stance-on-cattle-slaughter-affect-farmers 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.

168 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

https://archive.is/VQ02q https://archive.is/VQ02q

All the vultures suddenly died because farmers began treating their animals with a new drug that was harmless to the animals, but which was deadly to vultures that ate animals who had been treated with it. After all the vultures died there was less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease. The delicate balance of Nature was upset.

enjeyw 3y ago
> The delicate balance of Nature was upset. Fascinating stuff. A subtle build on this that just struck me: "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths" I think it's interesting because it strikes me that Nature is actually a pretty resilient system, it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to human life, to varying degrees. Then again, maybe I'm painting too much of an anthropocentric picture.
- owlninja 3y ago
  It is incredible how humans are incredibly resilient, but also very fragile.
  - wddkcs 3y ago
    The collective is resilient, it's individuals that perish.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      The collective perishes, it's individuals that persist.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > it's just that a lot of its stable-states are hostile to ~~human~~ life FTFY. We humans are part of nature too.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    FTFY: here’s a nature’s nature article on nature (pun intended) [0]. There’s 4 main definition which are exclusive to each others and guess what, your “fix” is within the same definition as GP: > The whole universe, as it is the place, the source and the result of material phenomena (including man or at least man’s body) Furthermore I think his point wasn’t about the definition of nature but instead going further on the classic argument “nature will be fine”. Of course universe will always be fine! But your descend may not be part of it. So yes, we should preserve the current equilibrium to preserve ourselves and that’s what this article is all about. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0390-y#Tab1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0390-y#Tab1
- OscarCunningham 3y ago
  I'd add a couple of points: 1. Nature isn't an 'equilibrium' and doesn't have 'stable states'. It's a constantly changing complex system that can produce catastrophic changes without any external triggers. 2. What people view as 'nature' is often itself a situation that humans have created. For example in this post the preexisting situation was vultures feeding on livestock, but the vultures weren't doing that before humans were around.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    Also vulture were probably consuming other mammals before human replace most of them with livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > "The delicate balance of Nature moved to a new equilibrium point that involved a lot more human deaths" As OscarCunningham has pointed out, nature does not have a balance or an equilibrium. That's the concept of "evolution".
pfannkuchen 3y ago
> less efficient scavenging of dead animals, more polluted water, and more disease The first one, yes, but for the others isn’t it kind of hard to evaluate the counter factual? How do we tease this apart from all the other factors contributing to polluted water and disease?
throwaway2037 3y ago
This drug (diclofenac) is partly covered in Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". More here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/arundhati-roy/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/aru... And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
dxbydt 3y ago
> The delicate balance of Nature was upset So what ? If Nature is upset you can submit it to Cell or Science. If its of interest to the medical community JAMA or Lancet might pick it up. At a 5% significance level, h-index of Nature is not that much different from these other peer reviewed publications.
psiops 3y ago
Not even that delicate, usually quite robust really. The interventions humans throw at it are just too massive.

jzl 3y ago

Paywalled, but there’s a great Radiolab episode about this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon

ethbr1 3y ago
Second recommendation. It was an extremely well-done episode. One of those where each rabbit hole leads to an even more interesting rabbit hole, and they're all answered at the end.
- leoh 3y ago
  They didn’t get into excess human deaths attributed, fwiw

rhaway84773 3y ago

This is an interesting article. One aspect few might notice is that India is also where the largest group of Zoroastrians/Parsis live. This is relevant because parsis dispose their dead not by burial or cremation but by placing them on towers where vultures can consume their bodies. The lack of vultures has been a huge problem for the community. It would be interesting to know if this contributed to that.

astrange 3y ago
https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Yes it did. Some Parsis are doing cremations now for this reason.

XargonEnder 3y ago

Perhaps there's a silver lining to this. Maybe the remaining vultures have a resistance to the drug and with an abundance of food they will be able to recover? I don't know any of this I'm just trying to be positive.

ars 3y ago
Once the cause was noticed governments were relatively quick at banning Diclofenac and vulture numbers are slowly recovering. Also people are breeding vultures with the intent to release them eventually. (There is still some illegal use of Diclofenac because it's legal for human use and some gets diverted to veterinary use.)
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Is there any record of the Indian government doing it? Ecological collapses such as this incident are quite serious and it’d make me happy to hear that some action is being taken.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    From the Drug Controller General of India in 2007 (the sources seem to be off by a year, or maybe it's just bureaucracy delays) [1]: > AGENDA ITEM NO.1 > CREATION OF A NEW SCHEDULE-H(1) AND CORRESPONDING CHANGES IN THE RULES UNDER THE DRUGS AND COSMETICS RULES FOR SPECIAL PRODUCTS WHICH ARE REOUIRED TO BE SOLD UNDER SPECIFIED CONDITIONS i.e. DICLOFENAC AND SPECIFYING CONDITIONS FOR SALE OF SUCH PRODUCTS. > DCG(I) explained that at present the sale of drugs is regulated under Schedule-H (prescription drugs), and under Schedule-X {psychotropic or habit forming drugs). A need is, however, being felt that a separate Schedule is required to monitor, control and evaluate sales of certain specific drugs where it is not desirable to allow indiscriminate and unregulated access. Such drugs- would be regulated through a new Schedule i.e. Schedule-H(l). The specific sale conditions for the drug will be notified by the Ministry of Healthand FW through notification. > The committee after deliberations agreed to the creation of a new Schedule-H 1 under the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules which would be strictly monitored by the State drug inspectors with a specific reference to Diclofenac preparations in respect of their veterinary use. The DCC also agreed to the prohibition of Diclofenac preparations for veterinary use. It further recommended that Diclofenac formulations meant for human use will print on their labels “Not for Veterinary Use” [1] https://cdsco.gov.in/opencms/resources/UploadCDSCOWeb/2018/UploadCommitteeFiles/38dcc.pdf https://cdsco.gov.in/opencms/resources/UploadCDSCOWeb/2018/U...

vxNsr 3y ago

The authors estimated an extra 100k deaths/year over 5 years… that’s very striking.

statguy 3y ago

I remember that during the early nineties, when I was kid, I often used to see over a dozen vultures perched on my maternal grandparents’ terrace in New Delhi on summer evenings (I visited them only in summer). A few years later I noticed that I didn’t see them anymore and occasionally wondered why. Then years later I started seeing articles about Diclofenac killing vultures and then it clicked. Just thought I’d share.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bandrami 3y ago

This had a big impact on the Zoroastarian community in Mumbai. They do "sky burials" where they leave remains exposed for the vultures to eat, but with so few vultures left in Maharashtra they had to import hawks.

waveBidder 3y ago
there's a good radiolab on that part of this. I wish their search function were better, but here's the episode where they talk about this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon

keepamovin 3y ago

This is terrible, but I relate a humorous misreading of the title that occurred just now: "The sudden demise of Indian Ventures killed thousands of startups" Indian Ventures sounds like a legit VC firm in the SW US. On topic tho, it's so weird that diclofenac kills vultures. It's such a useful and good pain-killer. Vultures are super interesting because they are very hardy and resilient to many shall we say "discomforts" that would be lethal (concession for hovering pedants: "exceedingly harmful") for humans. Makes me wonder if there's not some toxicity with diclo that we haven't noticed yet... 2nd order effect related: this is one of the things I'm so worried about when people talk about deliberately biosphere-engineering the extinction of mosquitoes. I know they 'seem a senseless pestilence upon the good Earth', but I think they're kind of vital in the same way. Not as obvious as carrion mungers, but vital non-the-less. If we eradicate them, I see more pandemics (concession for skeptics: I think it's related to immuno-modulation and horizontal gene transfer). Vultures are truly the death-eaters of nature. It's weird that a pain-killer kills them.

s_dev 3y ago
Vulture funds are definitely a thing in the financial world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulture_fund
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Cool! Yeah, they should just come out and say it: Vulture Ventures, 666 S Sepulveda Blvd
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Unlike the feathered variety, nobody would miss those.
thriftwy 3y ago
> I think they're kind of vital in the same way It's just so easy for the people in California to fight for the wellbeing of mosquitoes, hookworms and environment in general. While having an endless summer and highly energy intensive air conditioned environment around you. Not everybody on the planet does. Some people have half a year of winter and half a year of dense mosquito clouds. If only we could give you some for safekeeping.

Wronnay 3y ago

https://archive.li/m4h8E https://archive.li/m4h8E

falloutx 3y ago

Just shows how a small technical change by humans can bring an apocalypse.

myshpa 3y ago

> The cause was diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began using to treat their cattle https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-70-of-animal-populations-wiped-out-since-1970-report-reveals-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7... Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 Humans are driving one million species to extinction https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-approached.html https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap... The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974 More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends .. of 70,000 monitored species, some 48% are experiencing population declines from anthropogenic pressures ... ... global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction The biomass decrease is 80% for marine mammals, 50% for plants and 15% for fish. Currently, livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). As for birds, 70% are domesticated, such as poultry, whereas only 30% are wild. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120 Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/

NikhilVerma 3y ago

I remember vividly when going out with my family in the year 2000. There used to be a stretch of road filled with vultures. Then a few years later they just stopped existing. I haven’t seen a real vulture since then.

arp242 3y ago

Reading up on things, it seems these kind of problems also play in Africa, albeit slightly less dramatic and for different reasons (intentional poisoning and hunting seem to be the largest factors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_vulture_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_vulture_crisis

ChoGGi 3y ago

> 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, It isn't harmless to humans, it causes ulcers (if you take a big dose, like the vultures).

briandon 3y ago

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-stance-on-cattle-slaughter-affect-farmers 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.