Valuing vultures

Recently, two newsletters of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) published information which will be of utmost interest to all Parsis. I am therefore reproducing the relevant portions of the same for the benefit of your readers:

The director of BNHS A. R. Rahma-ni wrote in the newslet­ter dated March 4, 2004: "For a long time, we were told by ve­terinarians and avian disease experts that the vultures are dying due to some viral disease. New researches during the last two months prove that a painkiller drug called Diclofenac is killing them. Diclofenac came into veterinary use in the early 1990s in India. We started seeing decline of vultures from 1995-96 on­wards. In Pakistan, it came into use in 1998, and the vulture deaths were noticed within two years. Recently, we organized an international workshop to develop a Vulture Conservation Action Plan. Two most important recommendations of the workshop are that sufficient number of vultures of the three affected species should be brought into captivity quickly before they are killed by Diclofenac, and we all should work to ban veterinary use of this drug.”

The newsletter dated April 27, 2004 states, "The ministry of environment and forests, on April 20, organized a meeting of vulture experts and pharmaceutical companies. The companies were very positive about protecting vultures and other species, and were willing to phase out Diclofenac from veterinary use. Never­theless, unless this drug is removed from the environment, we should not rest in peace. The real success of this campaign would be when our sky would be full of vultures, like it used to be 10 years ago.”

RUBY KAMDIN

Bangalore