The quiet extinction of Vultures

Vultures are nature's clean up crew - by helping with the decomposition of animal carcasses. A cruel but necessary act to help prevent the spread of diseases. A dead animal can play host to a wide range of bacteria and fungi. Vultures can feed off these animals before any pathogens have had the chance to develop and multiple. Without vultures diseases such as rabies could rapidly increase along with the population of feral dogs, due to a higher availability of food. Increasing the chance of these diseases being transmitted to humans.

With the 2006 ban of Diclofenac, a cattle inflammatory drug, which once ingested by the vultures causes kidney failure. You would expect that the populations would be recovering. But with the continuing illegal selling of this drug and the latest deaths caused by poachers some species of vulture are facing the very real risk of extinction. Species such as the White- rumped Vulture has decreased by 99.9%.

Why are poachers causing the death of hundreds of vultures?

When poachers kill rhinos and elephants for their horns for the ivory trade (To learn more about the ivory trade go to this post https://www.animillsphotography.com/blog/another-trump-move)

vultures are attracted to the dead carcasses. Hundreds of circling vultures can be seen for miles alerting park ranges of a potential kill. Poachers don't want to be detected so lace the carcasses with poison to kill the vultures. Using this method more then 500 vultures can be killed from a single dead rhino or elephant!

So why don't more people know about this? Vultures lack the "cute" factor so a lot of the general public are either unaware or simple do not care. Wanting these "ugly" birds out of sights not realising what a crucial role they play in our ecosystem. As it stands 69% of condors and vultures are listed as threated on the IUCN red list, with the majority being critically endangered. If nothing is done it is very likely that these animals will go extinct and we will have to deal with dead animals ourselves costing the economy millions.

There is hope.... Many species of vulture have been captivity bred so that if wild vultures do go extinct, a very likely scenario, the species is not lost. When the environment is then safe again these captive birds can be released and vulture populations can begin to recover. This can not happen while the risk of being poisoned either by poachers or illegal cattle drugs is still high. By raising awareness of the high probability of vulture extinction more can be done to help protect these birds. All animals are worth saving not just the ones we deem as the "cutest".