Est. 1964 · Mumbai1964 – 2025 · every issue, digitised
Parsiana
The global Zoroastrian link medium
Readers' Forum

“To breed or not to breed”

Parsiana has carried a dispassionate dissection on the subject of vulture breeding ("To breed or not to breed,” Events and Personalities, June 7, 2017).
Dr Vibhu Prakash of the Bombay Natural History Society had categorically said, pre 2007, that breeding vultures in captivity was a non-starter.
Is any Parsi patient going to refuse his/her physician’s advice to take Voveran and Volini lest the diclofenac in its chemical composition kill a vulture that consumes him/her?
I used to travel extensively in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and learnt from the farmers that a major factor behind the vanished vultures was the DDT pesticide sprayed by the farmer on the carcass of his animal, killed by a big cat or a wolf. Since the predator normally returns to finish off the unfinished carrion, particularly of a big bovine, out of vengeance the farmer sprayed it with DDT, which killed the predator and the scavenging vultures. B. T. DASTUR

◆ ◆ ◆
From the archive