Towards a step to save 'Vultues'

[Arundhati Sinha]

Towards a step to save ‘Vultures’:

India, which has lost 99 per cent of the four-crore population of vultures in the last three decades and continues to witness the decline of the existing ones at the rate of 40 per cent annually, have stepped forward by the ‘customary’ observance of the World Vulture Awareness Day. In an effort to conserve the few remaining vultures in Punjab, a ‘restaurant for vultures’ - the first of its kind in the state – was started on October 12 to provide safe food for the highly endangered species. The aim is to double their population within a year and a half. The number of vultures in the state, which used to be in the hundreds of thousands in the 1960s and 1970s, has dwindled to less a thousand over the past few years. This has disturbed the environmental food chain, which in turn has led to a rising incidence of various types of diseases. Vultures have now become a rare sight as most of them were killed after feeding on the flesh of dead animals that had been administered diclofenac, a painkiller medicine. The ‘vulture restaurant’ provide dioclofenac-free food to vultures and assist in their natural breeding in an effort to increase their population, which would also be beneficial for the natural environment. Despite different surveys having established that 75 per cent of the vultures died of visceral gout and that all such vultures had Diclofenac in their tissues. A population survey by the BNHS in 2007 had put the number of slender-billed vultures at just 1,000, white-backed vultures at 11,000 and long-billed vultures at 44,000. All three have been accorded the ‘Critically Endangered’ status under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. But will this help? The single dose vial of the human form will surely compound the usage problems, as one will require a huge quantity for administering it to cattle. It’s though the presence of the large population of uneducated quacks and availability of spurious drugs that pose a bigger problem.On the other hand The Parsi community of the city has come with a proposal on a vulture breeding program. The Parsi community of the city -- who leave their dead out in the open to be consumed by vultures and were facing problems with disposing their dead with the dwindling number of vultures in the city -- are hoping to resolve the problem with an aviary to rear vultures. The Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) announced the project at a meeting with the community after the new trutees completed one year. They hope to build an aviary in next three to five years' time.
So that’s the effort that is taken in a smaller way for a greater cause…….