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South Africa's national lottery is claiming an unlikely victim: vultures. Local people - convinced these birds' superb eyesight gives them the gift to see the future - are eating vulture meat to acquire the power of clairvoyance.

And they are not alone. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, voters fearful of supporting the losing side in recent elections ate vulture meat, mainly heads, talons, eyes and hearts, believing this would enable them to pick the winning party. Then there has been the rise of traditional medicines, for which vulture parts are highly valued, as well as soaring cases of poisoning and shootings by starving farmers in East and West Africa.

In addition, in south Asia over the past five years, the use of the painkiller diclofenac in cattle has wiped out three species of vulture and reduced the remaining two species to a few dozen pairs of breeding birds. The drug, it was discovered recently, destroys the birds' kidneys....


'In India the cow is sacred and cannot be eaten. So it was traditionally left to vultures to eat their corpses. Without vultures, packs of feral dogs have taken over.'

These packs are 'destroying livestock and wildlife, harassing people and sometimes spreading rabies and other diseases,' added Chris Bowden, a vulture expert with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

In addition, the Parsees of India, who leave their dead on 'towers of silence' to be picked clean by vultures, have had to develop alternatives....

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Originally posted by Gorgo

Is your "Hear it from the Troops themselves" link temporarily dead or fatally dead?

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

This is very sad about the vulture extinctions, B. I hope that these are "merely" extinctions of the wild populations, and that there are captive specimens that could be bred and reintroduced, as was done with the California condor.

The turkey vultures in my neighborhood are doing well. A couple of months ago, I missed the last bus of the afternoon, and had to limp 2.5 miles home. As I was exhaustedly trekking along Highway 1, two of those unlovely beasts were standing in a field, about twelve feet away. They did not fly off, but turned their gazes on me as though trying to gauge just when I would drop. I've also seen as many as five turkey vultures perched together in eucalyptus trees here.

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