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Indian vulture crisis
Nine species of vulture can be found living in India. Today, most are in danger of extinction,〔http://www.iucnredlist.org/〕 but such has not always been the case. In the 1980s there were as many as 80 million white-rumped vultures (''Gyps bengalensis'') in India, when it was the most numerous species of raptor in the world.〔Houston, 1985〕 Today, however, its population numbers only several thousand, the fastest population collapse of any bird species in recorded history, including the Dodo.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Conserving South Asia's Threatened Vultures )〕
Vultures previously played an important role in public sanitation in India. Their disappearance has resulted in an explosion of rats and wild dogs; the spread of diseases including anthrax, rabies, and plague; a public health crisis; and a total cost of up to 34 billion US dollars (as of 2015).
== Historic context ==
It is important to understand why India formerly had such large vulture populations. Vultures are birds of prey that live in communities and anthropogenic environments and are generally very dependent on human activities (culture, society, etc.). The Hindu culture in India is particularly favorable to vultures, and represents 80% of the country’s population.〔Indian statistics, 2001〕 Hindus do not eat cows, which they consider sacred. Cows are used, however, for milk products and as beasts of burden. When a cow dies, it is not eaten by humans, but by vultures. Of the estimated 500 million head of cattle in India,〔ILC 2003, projection based on Animal Husbandry Statistics, Government of India.〕 only 4% are destined for consumption by humans as meat.〔FAO, 2003〕 Vultures constitute India’s optimal natural animal disposal system, processing carcasses even in cities. Up to 15,000 vultures have been observed at the carcass depositories of New Delhi.〔Birds of prey of the Indian subcontinent, Rishad Naoroji, 2007, Om Books international〕
In the 1990s, a decrease in the number of vultures in the skies over India was first noted by Vihbu Prakash of the Bombay Natural History Society, who had monitored vulture populations at Keoladeo National Park.〔Trivedi, Bijal P.; ‘India Vulture Die-Off Spurs Carcass Crisis’; ''National Geographic Today'', 28 December 2001〕 As this decline accelerated, they and others in the international scientific community looked to find the reason. At first there were many difficulties to be overcome because vultures could not legally be killed for scientific study in India and freshly dead animals had become extremely rare, a situation exacerbated by the extremely hot weather in India where temperatures before the monsoon routinely exceed .〔McGrath, Susan; (‘The Vanishing’ ), ''Smithsonian Magazine'', February 2007〕 Moreover, Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London found that the usual suspects of pesticide poisoning, industrial pollutants or bacteria did not show anything abnormal in the vultures he could examine.〔 This led Cunningham to say at the close of 1999 that
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