99% Invisible - 579 BONUS- Towers of Silence: Vulture Conservation

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lasha Madan and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good. On the one hand, it's a very specific story, it's about a unique set of circumstances that happened to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant. Because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there’s a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something we are on track to see more of in these times. Lasha Madan collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in their reporting but it didn't quite fit into the original story that we wanted to tell but it's so vital and interesting that we're releasing this bonus episode to cover it all.

This is a 99 percent invisible bonus episode. I'm Roman Mars. Recently, we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lash Madan, and it is epic, it is beautiful.

So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good. It's so worth your time. On the one hand, it's a very specific story. It's about a unique set of circumstances that happen to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there's a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly, it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something that we are on track to see more of in these times.

And you, Lasha, collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in your reporting, and it didn't quite fit into the story that we wanted to tell, but it is so vital and so interesting that I wanted to have you on to talk more about that stuff specifically. So where we left off in the episode, there's this hope that the vultures might one day return to the wild in huge numbers.

So I want to start there. What is the deal with vultures in India, both in the wild and in captivity in present day 2024? Yes. Hi, Roman. Hi. Yeah. There's a lot in here and there's a lot that didn't quite fit into the main episode that I'm excited to talk about. Yeah.

Specifically about all the other ways that humans relate to vultures and all the kind of nerdy stuff about vulture conservation happening right now. So there were three different species that experienced a dramatic decline between 95% to 99%. Today, there are eight vulture conservation and breeding centers in India. And there are a total of about 800 vultures in captivity.

It's estimated that throughout India, there were once about 40 million vultures in the wild. Today, that number is in the thousands. And 800 vultures in captivity might sound like a small number, but it should be said that without vulture conservation, these vultures would have been completely extinct by now. So today, thanks to a number of factors, the banning of vulture toxic drugs, public campaigns to use vulture safe drugs, and all the work at these conservation

centers to slowly and patiently breed healthy vultures. Vulture populations in India are not declining. They're not facing extinction. The populations across vulture species have stabilized, but we're not seeing a wholesale increase in the vulture population. So it's not like we can say the work is over. And test releases of these captive vultures are happening. But as we left off in the story, it's largely a waiting game because vulture toxic drugs are still out there in the wild.

Yeah. And so what is the process of vulture conservation? Like what do they do? Yeah. So I was lucky enough to visit the largest vulture conservation and breeding center. It's in Punjore in a state of India called Haryana in North India. And it was opened in 2001 by Dr. Vibhu Prakash, who, if you listen to the episode, he is, he refutes the title that he's been given by many people as the vulture king of India. He doesn't like that. But he is considered... the leading vulture biologist.

He happened to be doing research kind of begrudgingly on vultures. He wasn't so interested in vultures at the time. This is before the decline because he was more interested in species that were rare or harder to find and cultures were kind of boring to him because they were just everywhere. And then all of a sudden he became the person who happened to have so much knowledge because of the research he'd been doing. And so what did the conservation center actually look like?

It didn't look quite like what I expected it to look like. It was a bunch of concrete warehouses, essentially. To get there, I drove down, or I was driven down a very windy road. We got lost so many times that we had to stop, pull over multiple times, and ask people, hey, do you know where the Vulture Conservation Center is? Nobody knew what we were talking about. And there's also no signage, by the way. If you remember from the episode, vultures are easily freaked out by humans. Vultures will vomit as a response to being close to humans.

It can also interrupt their laying pattern. All to say that conservationists don't really want these centers to attract a ton of attention or for them to randomly get curious visitors. Which for me meant that it was hard to find, but eventually I did get there and I was given a tour by Nikita Prakash. Nikita currently runs the center.

She also happens to be the wife of Vibhu Prakash. Together they've been involved in vulture research and conservation for decades. Wow, it's very tall. These aviaries. 20 feet high, 40 feet wide, and 100 feet long. I mentioned it was the largest. So there's 800 vultures in captivity total throughout India.

This center has 400 of them. Oh, wow. And you know, there's a bunch of different rooms, a breeding room, there's an incubation room. This is our incubation and brooder room. Shall I show you from inside? There's a little warehouse looking thing where they house the food for the vultures,

which is all goat. So that is our food processing room. When the goats are brought here, then we, according to the number of vultures, we prepare and we provide them. And then there's just rows and rows of cement aviaries. You can't really get a clear view of vultures except through these windows that are cut through the cement. And inside, vultures sit on ledges and perches embedded into the walls. There's a roof made of strong metal mesh to make sure that no other animals, like leopards and whatnot, will get inside. Every aviary has four baths that are cleaned twice a week.

Also twice a week, the vultures are fed, and they're fed through a little door where skinned goat carcasses are just slid through. Wow, this feels like a lot of effort to maintain. Yeah. I mean, the two of them are so committed. They're so committed to this work. Nikita told me that the religion she practices is called Jainism. And in Jainism, you don't eat meat, but in addition to meat, you also don't eat anything that grows underground.

So garlic, eggs, onions, or eggs don't grow underground, so garlic, onions, you know, and yet she watches 400 vultures eat skinned goat meat twice a week with an extreme dedication. And yet you watch the vultures consume. I've eaten nestlings on goat meat. And you say that with a big smile. Now I'm used to it. It's very interesting. So there's one other room at the Conservation Center.

It's a pretty simple room. The biggest thing, the most obvious thing that's in there is a large monitor that has a series of CCTV cameras on them. It's a control room, essentially. And Vibhu and Nikita and a lot of their staff spend a lot of time in there. And this is how they observe vulture behavior. I learned that sometimes Vibhu would even sleep in the room and occasionally watch the CCTV screen just to make sure that the vultures are doing okay.

Every time an egg is to hatch, he sleeps here to make sure that it hatches. Do you have children? Yeah, we have two boys. All these 400 vultures are kind of like your wild children. Yeah, I mean, I took care of newborn twins. It sounds exactly the same. You're just like always making sure they're alive. Yeah, and I mean, the one major difference, I guess, is in their case, the whole future

of a species is kind of riding on their dedication. So it's, yeah, it's a lot. And during the height of COVID in India, everything was highly militarized and locked down. And so Vibhu and Nikita and their staff really struggled to get to the conservation center because to be able to travel you needed to move through various checkpoints. But then they also really struggled to find enough meat, to find enough food for the vultures to survive. And they were really worried. They told me they worked until they wilted. During Corona, we were not worried for ourselves.

We were worried about the vultures, how food will come for them. Yeah, I mean we would get nightmares, how to get food. And we were contemplating releasing them because we were, one week we could not get food. But release them, then what will happen? So in spite of all the barriers and restrictions we would come to the center every day. Every day. And then mobilize the forest department because they can they have access they can give you permission to get food. Wow and you did it. We did it. You were able to feed the vultures every week.

Every week. So is there a lot of support for the work? Do other people recognize how important this is? As you can probably imagine, vultures are not a sexy animal. They don't compare to the amount of attention and money that tiger conservation gets, for example. And vulture conservation also has to contend with not only public apathy, but active fear. A lot of people fear vultures. I spoke to one vulture biologist who told me about a time he was doing research and

trapping vultures in a particular village in India. And he learned that in this area, vultures were such a bad omen that if they were seen to be landing on someone's house, it was thought that what that meant is that someone in that house is going to die. And so what they would do is dismantle that house, move out and build a new home. It's hard to get people who have money, including governments, to see how important vultures are as a keystone species, that their conservation is really important. It's also really expensive because for each goat

to go through the testing to make sure that what's in the goat system will not kill the vultures. That's really expensive. And so vulture conservation is contending with just the need for a lot of money. Yeah, so we know that the vultures have always meant a great deal to the parses in India, but what other changes has the vulture's absence brought about to India as a whole? It's changed, you know, the vultures created this void. Vultures are a keystone species, which means if this species disappears or dramatically reduces in size,

it shifts everything. So when vultures were around, there was this very specific cycle that existed in India whenever a cow carcass or any other kind of animal carcass would die. The carcasses of animals used to just be left all over the countryside. A cow dies in the field, they just leave it and the vultures would come. Very convenient, very handy.

Didn't have to touch it, didn't have to move it. Most of these cows are left to die naturally and vultures were always the reliable cleanup crew. So a cow would die, then a group of people in India known as cattle skinners would come and they would skin the cow. Often they'd be on call, these skinners would show up with a crew. Sometimes the skinners would find work by just looking at the sky and seeing where, looking at the general area that vultures were beginning to circle. That makes sense. This work is hard and often it's this kind of work that you inherit through the caste

system. Often this work is designated to people who are lower caste. And this is how they make their living. They sell the hide to the leather industry. But this process also interestingly helps the vultures. The vultures don't need their food to be skinned, but once it's skinned, it makes it easier for vultures to access the meat because vulture beaks actually can't penetrate cattle skin. It's too tough.

And so they access the innards only through like the eyes and the mouth and such. And so it's just, it's a little bit messier. It takes more time. So it's not like a necessity, but it's, you know, it helps them out a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense.

And so, okay. So the cow dies, the skinners come, and now the vultures are here. Once the vultures do their job, a separate group of workers called bone collectors come and they collect the bones that are left and they sell these bones and that's how they make their money.

And these bones are mostly sold to fertilizer companies. Wow. So it's this whole economic cycle all around the natural death of a cow. Exactly. So when the vultures stopped coming, this cycle broke. And there was an attempt to implement a system called carcass dump sites, essentially carcass landfills on the outskirts of towns and villages. And when the vultures stopped coming, most towns and villages started creating these

carcass dumps. Like, they collect, new jobs came up, they collect the carcasses, they dump them in this one area. But these carcass dump sites led to a new problem. Now when animals die, livestock dies, they're taken to these carcass dump sites where piles of cows and buffaloes and, you know, livestock are there. And so who is this? This is Munir Varani.

He is a raptor biologist who worked alongside Vibhu Prakash and dozens of other scientists back in the early 2000s to conclude that diclofenac was the thing that killed the vultures. I remember that you would not see vultures at these carcass dump sites and you would see thousands of feral dogs. They looked vicious. I mean, it was a scary thing. So Manir told me that these dump sites essentially became a breeding ground for feral dogs. Dogs started to breed even inside the rib cages of these cow carcasses.

Oh my god, Lasha. Roman, I have photos and I could share them with you. Okay, okay. God, Lasha. I have photos and I could share them with you. Okay, okay. But I feel like I almost don't need to. You can imagine. No, I got it. So it was actually found that the population of feral dogs across India increased by 5.5

million in the same time period that the vulture population was rapidly declining in the 1990s and early 2000s. And Roman, I don't know if you know this, but vultures only ever go after dead things. They never attack the living. Yeah, but I imagine dogs do. Dogs do. They actually prey on the living. Dogs also transmit rabies, and in India, rabies is a real concern. It's been a real concern for a long time. India has the highest number of rabies related deaths in the world. There's a very strong correlation between the decline in vultures and the

number of cases of rabies that have gone up. I mean dog numbers have just skyrocketed because there's a super abundance of food now that is available that vultures used to get rid of in the past. And I imagine that the dogs are not these efficient, clean eaters the way the vultures are, right? They really just make a mess. My dog makes an incredible mess. You're right.

Unlike vultures, dogs, really anything else that would go for the carcass. So dogs, rats, other birds of prey like we mentioned in the episode, kites and crows. None of these animals are able to consume a carcass entirely. They're picky. And so what this means is two things happen environmentally. The first is that these dogs, they are more likely to transmit the diseases that the vultures have historically prevented from spreading. Remember that the vulture's stomach is actually more acidic than battery acid. It can consume all the gnarly stuff and just kill it. It can kill it inside its body, right? But these dogs, they just pass on these

diseases. And so it leads to potentially higher rates of infection. And the second thing, the second kind of big environmental consequence is that because there's no other animal that consumes an entire carcass, there's this risk that the dead carcass matter, whatever is in it, a disease or whatever, it can spread into the water and the soil. It can leach into the water and the soil because the remains are not totally gone. And so, it's a whole mess. Yeah. I mean, this is what you mean by keystone species. I mean, just like the whole system collapses. And the thing is that it's not something that is so visible to the human eye right away. You know, the thing that I found so compelling about the the the Parsi experience when it comes to vultures is

that it's so tangible. And sometimes, you know, in order for humans to care and to really see a change, it needs to be really in your face. And I think that's what made it so compelling. But all of this stuff is also happening in the background. That's a little bit harder to see that we should also care about. Recently there were two environmental economists who published this big body of work looking at vultures in India and the environmental consequences and economic consequences of vultures in India. They found that on average human death

rates supposedly increased by more than 4% in what they call vulture-suitable districts after these birds nearly went extinct. So what they mean is that in the areas that they surveyed where vultures used to exist in high numbers and are now no longer there, the general mortality rate has seemed to increase by 4%. A large portion of this is attributed to rabies, but it could be all sorts of reasons for mortality. And they also found evidence that there's been an increase in feral dog populations and rabies and lower water quality in these regions. Wow.

Okay, so it's clear that these vultures have left a void when it comes to waste management in India, and they operated as this kind of immune system for the country. And so what do you do now? How do you fill this void? Because clearly the dogs aren't doing it and the carcass dumps aren't doing it And so what do you do now? How do you fill this void? Because clearly the dogs aren't doing it and the carcass dumps aren't doing it. Like, what do you do? Yeah, it's almost making it, I mean, it's making it worse.

It's made it worse, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a really tough and interesting problem. So what I found is that municipal governments all over India, not all, but some, have been trying to figure out how to implement sustainable infrastructure to do the job that vultures did for millennia when it comes to waste management and sanitation services

that the vultures provided. And so there are municipalities that are grappling with questions like, do we incinerate cows to prevent disease from spreading? If we do, what are the kind of infrastructural hoops we need to go through to like, one, make sure that people will do this once we build it? Or should we bury them?

Should we make carcass dump sites the official solution and somehow try to prevent dogs from getting in or something. So different places in India are trying different possibilities, but each idea comes with its own set of hurdles. Burial and incineration cost money, and if the burden is on the farmer or the cattle owner to pay for disposing of its dead cattle when prior to this ecological shift they had to do absolutely nothing. Are they going to? Manir actually told me that some people just dump their dead

animals into the Ganga because it's the cheapest option. And so you've got these bloated carcasses now just floating down the river. Oh dear God. That's an awful image of a bloated cow carcass floating down the river. Oh dear God, that's an awful image of a bloated cow carcass floating down the river. Yeah. And what we're seeing too is that as India's governments grapple with creating and implementing a new system of infrastructure, these systems will very likely, and in some places already have, put the jobs of those cattle skinners and bone collectors at risk because if cows are being shipped off to an incineration center they

don't need to be skinned anymore. So is there any hope to take you know these 800 vultures that are in captivity and release them and begin to solve some of these problems, at least in a small way? It's a really thin line between wanting to release these vultures and not wanting to send them off to their death. As mentioned in the main episode, these drugs, these toxic drugs are still out there and they're increasing in number. And some of them are slowly getting banned.

Two of these newer toxic drugs were banned in 2023. But again, we also learned that banning a drug doesn't necessarily equal to the eradication of the drug in the environment. And so, yeah, and this is the thing that biologists who are behind this conservation work are really, really grappling with. Because they can't control the drugs in the wider populace at all. Yeah, so the main vulture conservation center, the one I visited, it's formally called the Jatayu Conservation and Breeding Center in Punjur. And that name, Jatayu, it references a particular Hindu myth about a vulture god named Jatayu.

In Hindu mythology, there's a vulture king, and he sacrifices his life to save a suffering human. He was thought to have lived for over 6,000 years. This vulture king was known for his kind heart and his strong wings. And one day, he tries to save a human life. But in return, he was wounded, his wings were cut, and he was left to die in abject pain. Oh. I mean, that is interesting that they chose that as a name,

because, you know, that's the story of a vulture ultimately dying. But it's also this reminder of the faith that they're trying to avoid. Yeah. And I think one thing I found kind of clever is that they use this myth about Jatayu in their public messaging. So they go often from village to village and talk to people and try and get people to care about vultures. Referencing this story, which is for a lot of people in India, it's like one of their main kind of reference points for vultures. It's kind of the one positive one, you know what I mean?

So Vibhu told me that they're constantly working to persuade farmers to not use black market diclofenac or other toxic drugs. Vibu's team collects carcass samples and they do routine drug tests. They find safe alternatives and they lobby the government and pharmaceutical companies to sell those instead. They also go undercover in drug stores, pretending to be a farmer with a sick cow. And they'll see if doctors still prescribe all these toxic drugs. Oh, wow. Wow.

Yeah. It's really hands-on work. Yeah. I mean, they're really fighting on all fronts. I mean, just God bless them. They've also implemented something across the country called Vulture safe zones, or VSZs. So these VSZs, like that areas where there's a hundred kilometer radius area where they really, really work hard with the farmers and everybody else to make sure that that area is diclofenac free. They've already started doing some test releases in these areas and the idea is that let's start somewhere and maybe one day it'll be safe to fully release these birds.

Yeah. But I mean, the big problem with that is that vultures can fly and I imagine they fly a lot further than 100 kilometers. They can. Yeah. And so it's it's this interesting thing where the strategy is to create this zone, but ultimately it's an imaginary zone. It's an imaginary line that it's not like the vultures are aware of this. But Vibhu and others will tell you that at least it's something. Yeah. I'm glad that they're trying something. And so what's going on with vultures beyond India?

Yeah. And so what's going on with vultures beyond India? Yeah, every country in South Asia is on its own journey. And it's slightly different because, you know, the governments will make different decisions. There's a lot of different kind of forces at play that mean that every country kind of is seeing a different version of this. An interesting success story though is Nepal. It's hard to compare the two countries, Nepal and India, because you know India is much larger. The catastrophe was also

much larger. There were more vultures there. But also, Diklofenak came on the market in India several years before Nepal. And so by the time they found that diclofenac was the problem, there was just a little bit more time. They had more time before a total collapse happened in Nepal. But Nepal has taken on a really interesting strategy that a lot of people point to as one of the reasons for its success. Besides vulture safe zones and captive breeding, which they have also in Nepal, they also have a community-led effort called Vulture Restaurants. It's not a new concept. It was borrowed from conservation work in Europe and in Africa.

But vulture restaurants are essentially areas out in the open, in fields, so not in captivity, where the vultures have gotten used to food being provided for them, specifically drug-safe food. So people will go test these drugs and bring a bunch of food. And it's even become kind of a way to boost local economies. It's turned into kind of a tourist attraction where people will come, they'll pay some money to watch these vultures eat. It's a thing that vultures have gotten used to, like, okay, here and here and here are reliable sources of consistent food.

I'm going to go here instead of needing to look for my own food. Even though it's out in the wild, it's been effective. And so what do you think the future is going to hold for vultures in India? I think what's clear is that the population of vultures in India is never going to go back to what it once was, even if the population is stable and healthy. And that's because humans and animals were continuously adapting. And now that the vultures are gone, cities and states in India are grappling with what to do with their dead cows that are just lying open and they're trying to corner them off

and put them in these dump sites or in these incinerators. What that means for vultures, should they return, is that their food supply will be dramatically reduced. And in their absence, we're gonna, we're, we need to adapt, you know, we need to figure out a new system. And so it's this back and forth. It's this continuous thing. When it comes to thinking about the future of vultures in India, I think an image that I just want to leave you with is an image that Vibhu left me with, which is that in the future should we see, you know, successful releases of these vultures, even if they all

get released, the reality is that they might not survive in urban areas. They might not flock to urban areas anymore, like places like Tunggurvadi in Mumbai, for example, because there's so many other things that are in the way, these high rise buildings that are blocking their flight path. The country of India is going through this rapid process of electrification. And so all of these wires are in the way of the vultures.

And that maybe what the future holds is that vultures kind of cordon themselves off to areas that are more protected, that are more wild. They stay on the mountains, the cliff sides, they stay in the forests. Thirty years ago, vultures could survive in Delhi, but now they cannot. So now ultimately vultures will be confined to protected areas. That is going to happen. I asked Vibhu how the prospect of this made him feel. You know, in his childhood, he was so used to seeing vultures just everywhere. So many people were.

But what if vultures never returned to these places? I think that will be good. They had done a good service for us when we didn't have the resources. Now we have to take care of the cattle ourselves. Yeah, we've proven ourselves to be not very good neighbors. So, for their own sake, maybe they should just stay away for their own good. This is really fascinating, Anlasha. Thank you so much for this extra time and just the beautiful story that you produced and all this extra information. I love this stuff. It makes me so happy to learn and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about it.

Thanks so much. This was really fun. This bonus episode of 99% of Invisible was reported by Lasha Madan. Lasha's reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. Mix by Haseek Bin Ahmad Fareed. Music by Swan Real. Thanks to this episode's vulture experts, Vibhu and Nikita Prakash, Mira Subramanian, and Munir Varani.

If you want to learn more about vultures, I highly recommend you go and follow all of their work. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kirk Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivienne Le, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prine, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Sarah Bake, Christopher Johnson, Nina Potuck, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.