Two mangy dogs tug at the flesh of an animal carcass among piles of dirt and rubbish. The wind carries a strong, nauseatingly sweet, rotting smell. There are people, too, at this dump just outside Chandigarh in the northern Indian state of Haryana, children and adults sifting through rubbish for anything useable or saleable. Filling the sky above are hundreds of birds: black kites, egrits, wagtails, crows. But, strangely, no vultures. ‘Twenty years ago, there’d have been scores of vultures around a place like this,’ says Chris Bowden, a Species Recovery Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Vulture numbers started to decline rapidly in the early 1990s in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The cause was diclofenac, a cheap and effective painkiller and anti-inflammatory, which began to be used widely on cattle. Vultures today are ‘critically endangered’.
