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"It's easy to look at a "gross" animal like a vulture and wonder, 'what good is it?' But time and time again, we see that when species disappear, it creates catastrophic human consequences as well."
The collapse of India's vultures killed 500,000 people.
A peer-reviewed 2024 study in the American Economic Review put the toll at 100,000 extra human deaths per year for five straight years.
In 1994, Indian farmers began giving their cattle diclofenac, which is a common painkiller. The drug caused fatal kidney failure in any vulture that fed on a treated carcass. India's vulture population dropped from roughly 50 million birds to 20,000 in a decade. Three species crashed by more than 99%.
Vultures had been the country's free, invisible sanitation system. A flock could strip a dead cow in 30 minutes, sterilizing the meat with stomach acid strong enough to kill anthrax, rabies, and most pathogens that survive in rotting flesh.
When the vultures disappeared, the carcasses stayed in fields and on roadsides for weeks. Feral dog populations exploded by at least 5 million due to the extra calories they could scavenge. Rabies cases surged. Fecal bacteria in drinking water more than doubled. Farmers began dumping dead livestock in rivers. It was an ecological crisis on multiple fronts.
India banned diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006. Vulture numbers are now recovering slowly. But the death toll from those years is the price tag of erasing a single species from a single ecosystem.
It's easy to look at a "gross" animal like a vulture and wonder, 'what good is it?' But time and time again, we see that when species disappear, it creates catastrophic human consequences as well.