Vulture poisoning exposes flaws in our conservation efforts
An entire vulture colony was nearly wiped out after feeding on dead dogs, jackals, and jungle cats that had consumed goat carcasses laced with poison. This highlights the urgent need to minimise retaliatory killings of wildlife to avoid collateral deaths
The last week of March was a sad spell for the conservation community of Bangladesh — the country experienced its first event of vulture poisoning.
Fourteen vultures, along with half a dozen golden jackals, jungle cats, and feral dogs, were found rotting in a field in Moulvibazar. Their deaths were revenge killings by some farmers after a goat was killed by some unknown carnivorous mammals. They laced the carcass with poison, leading to the deaths of many more creatures.
The event was noticed after the beacon of the world's first GPS-tagged white-rumped vulture went off.
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Vultures have been on this earth for almost 2.6 million years. They have the strongest of stomachs in the animal kingdom. They live on carcasses, keeping ecosystems balanced. They can see the carcass of a dead animal from impressive heights and then quickly descend to devour it. They can even digest bones. Even deadly viruses and bacteria cannot survive their strong acidic digestive juices.
Vultures, as time can recall, have done nothing wrong. They do not prey on poultry or livestock. Neither do they pick off babies, nor do they have a taste for human eyes — in contrast to common stigmas.
Vultures are not bad omens. On the contrary, they were once revered as gods. In the epic Ramayana, the vulture demigod Jatayu gave a good fight to the Lankan king Ravana. In history, vultures always appear to be the first line of defence, from warding off evil to checking off the spread of deadly pathogens.
Yet, in recent times, they have suffered the most and have always been collateral damage. And everything happened in just 50 years.
With the rapid advent of livestock and farming practices, luck has seemed to run out for vultures. The spread of steroid-type drugs used to medicate sick cattle and synthetic insecticides has ushered in a boon for farmers.
But it makes the cattle unpalatable for vultures.
Once dead cattle that have been treated with steroids are eaten, vultures can die immediately. As a long-term impact, vulture breeding gets affected. Being a slow breeder with one chick in a breeding cycle, the cost is too high to bear for the vultures. Fifteen out of the 23 vulture species in the world are currently at risk of extinction.
But it could be a whole different story. In Bangladesh, where wildlife conservation case studies are a rarity, the whole-hearted effort of IUCN Bangladesh to save vultures is exemplary. It is said that in the 1970s, there were 400,000 vultures in Central India. At that time, Bangladesh had about 50,000. Today, 99% of white-rumped vultures have disappeared. We have only 260 individuals clustered at two hotspots — the Sundarbans and Moulvibazar.
As remedies, vulture-safe zones have been identified and diclofenac and ketoprofen usage on cattle have been banned; for the latter, we were the first country to do so. Vulture restaurants have been created so that they can eat cattle free of deadly steroids. Vultures are tagged so that their movements can be monitored. And Bangladesh was the first country to tag a white-rumped vulture.
Nonetheless, the vulture poisoning event was a costly blow. And it points towards a glaring gap in our conservation strategies.
Vulture poisoning is not uncommon in the world, but it is always invariably interconnected with carnivorous mammals. In Africa, poachers poison vultures en masse so that they can not track their kills and their locations stay concealed from rangers. In other places, like Nepal and India, carnivores are killed as a retaliatory response. People often despise carnivores for they pick on livestock out of food scarcity. Carnivores get baited with a poisoned kill and vultures get caught in the crossfire.
In contrast to Africa, Nepal, and India, where carnivore conservation is in momentum and the idea of human-carnivore coexistence is being introduced, Bangladesh has no mentionable gain, if at all. The country hosts about half of the carnivore mammals found in India, but there is no systematic research on an array of species, many of which are equally charismatic and threatened like vultures.
The carnivores that live in close association with humans are bearing the brunt of the attacks. They get poisoned, electrocuted, or even beaten to a pulp. Earlier in 2022, even a leopard got electrocuted after tripping a wire that was laid to protect a poultry farm. Every two weeks, a fishing cat-human conflict incident is occurring somewhere in Bangladesh.
For "more common" carnivores like jackals and jungle cats, there is no database at all. The situation is so disheartening that anything that seems "wild" and "new" to the commoner's eye is to be caught, beaten, bruised, or chased to death.
There are occasions in northern Bangladesh when people even ate sick vultures after they dropped down from the sky. There are occasions when nilgai, Asia's largest and strongest antelope, was chased to death after they crossed the border and unknowingly ventured into Bangladesh.
I wonder if it were not the case, would we even notice the jackals and cats that were decaying alongside the vultures? For how long have they been dying that way? Do we even care to notice the intricate interconnectivity that a functional ecosystem can have? Or, do we consider them expendables?
One of my colleagues once said we need to stay inspired by small conservation gains, for conservation is a tricky feat to achieve. True. But without connecting the small gains, without having the perspective, without tapping the human-wildlife coexistence synergy, a disaster like the vulture poisoning is inevitable. A single light is always at risk of being switched off.
Another colleague said we might need to let go of some species. He aspired that Bangladesh would bounce back in wildlife diversity after 30 or 40 years. Where we have only 260 vultures and we do not know how many bears we have, or we do not care to save backyard wildlife, do we have the luxury to linger on big what-ifs?
I feel hopeful to see the remaining vultures of the hard-hit colony again nesting. But we need to stay alert knowing that our vultures are on life support. Without creating a Bangladesh that will learn to live alongside wildlife, particularly carnivorous mammals, we are simply delaying the extinction process.
