But needless to say, I can't manage to shed a tear for vultures.
Posted on 11/12/2007 2:19:54 PM PST by qam1
What if there were an environmental catastrophe and nobody came? Would it tell us anything about the environmental movement that it can make headline news out of a warm day in April – yet when there is no political gain to be had, it can ignore the near extinction of three major species? I believe it would.
Let’s talk about the biggest environmental disaster you’ve never heard of: the wholesale slaughter of India’s entire vulture population. In just over a decade, the combined population of India’s three species of vultures has plummeted from around 30 million to just 10,000 today – and the remaining population is declining by some 50 percent per year. The hardest-hit species, the slender-billed vulture, now totals only 400 birds.
The birds have been nearly extirpated as a result of consuming cattle carcasses containing the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, used to treat arthritis and other ailments in both humans and cattle. Abundantly manufactured by India’s massive generic drug industry, a course of the drug costs less than $1.
Since cattle are sacred to India’s Hindus and not slaughtered for meat, most die from illness or old age (and thus are likely to have been recently treated with diclofenac). Traditionally, the skinned carcasses are left for the vultures to consume. But diclofenac, so beneficial to mammals, is highly poisonous to many birds. Vultures eating contaminated cattle rapidly develop kidney failure and die of visceral gout – the deposition of crystalline metabolic wastes in the viscera. The compound is so toxic to vultures that, by one account, just one contaminated carcass in 760 would be enough to wipe out the vultures completely.
As a result of the vultures’ disappearance, carcasses putrefy or are burned, and hordes of feral dogs have appeared to fill the empty role of scavenger – a frightening prospect, since India is already home to most of the world’s rabies cases. Additionally, the vultures’ decimation has left India’s Parsee population, whose religion forbids them from either burying or cremating the dead, in quite a bind. For ages, they have offered up their dead on special funeral towers, to be consumed by the birds. Now the corpses remain and rot. In desperation, the Parsees have rigged mirrors to speed the sun’s desiccation of their accidental mummies.
Incredibly, 99.9 percent of three major species have been extinguished in the ecological blink of an eye over an entire subcontinent, and yet this tale can’t fight for news time with stories of global warming allegedly shortening the Swiss Alps ski season by two weeks. Even more amazing, despite the fact that it has been amply demonstrated scientifically that the vultures have been killed by a single man-made chemical, there is no outcry or protest. To my knowledge, not one celebrity Greenie has bemoaned the loss of the vultures in an expletive-filled Oscar acceptance speech.
How can this be? The simple answer is that the environmental movement is far less a cause in itself than merely a re-branding, a tool of the same old tired leftism that has been lingering around the West’s intelligentsia since Marx first cobbled together a socially acceptable reason for the spoiled young bourgeois to destroy the bourgeoisie. All the same targets are demonized: capitalism, greed, industrialization, corporations, the rich, the West, and the successful. And the Green movement is simply uninterested in any disaster that doesn’t aid their attacks on these well-worn bogeymen.
Imagine if “Big Oil” had killed the vultures: would it be an unknown event? If an American drug corporation or SUV exhaust had caused the poisoning, would their deaths go unnoticed?
The birds are gone, but the villain is unsatisfying. It was not the rich who killed them, nor industry, nor Western society. No blame can be placed on factory farms, or Halliburton, or capitalism. The vultures are facing extinction because of the actions of impoverished peasants using cheap generic drugs from indigenous factories, a result of economic planning and subsidy.
If the environmental movement were about the environment, the loss of the vultures would be sufficiently disturbing, whatever the cause. But the environmental movement is about politics and posturing. So the annihilation of the vultures is an environmental catastrophe of little interest to environmentalists.
Spot on. The last 4 paragraphs or so are especially good.
Shoot the feral dogs and bring in coyotes. They will haul off and consume all cow parts.
What, the envoironmentalists not be concerned about environmental issues? I find that hard to believe. /s
Interesting. I hadn’t heard of this before.
Maybe?
Won’t rats have to take up the slack?
Exactly. In the same way, the multiple currently-ongoing environmental catastrophes in China hardly rate any concern.
No need to shoot the feral dogs. The coyotes will take care of them........
Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
—Night-Song in the Jungle
from The Jungle Book
Oh great, now they’ll want to ban diclofenac. I’ve been using this stuff since 2002, when I severed my achilles tendon.
After surgery and rehab, as long as I take this stuff I can walk fine, climb ladders and even run a little, with no side effects. I’ve tried stopping it four times so far, each time, within about a week, I can barely walk.
The Soviets, and now the Russians, are draining an entire sea, and nobody gives a damn. The Soviets, and now the Russians, can do no wrong in the environmentalist’s eyes.
Now why would they be so soft on the Soviets? I can’t imagine why...
Paris Hilton should have chosen these vultures instead of her alcoholic elephants to save.
Where is the sport in that?
BZZZT!!! Wrongo! I was getting really hopeful that some other commentator was finally going to get it, but alas!
The environmentill move-mint is about money, and always has been. It's about putting the small private domestic firm out of business and empowering the owners of global multinational corporations. They use private, tax-exempt "charitable" foundations to emplace regulations preferential to their investments. That's how it's worked since the days of Roosevelt, when JP Morgan was financing his "trust-busting" attacks on Rockefeller.
Brer Rabbit is immortal.
Where's your sarcasm tag?
And in the same way NOW has no interest in the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
But needless to say, I can't manage to shed a tear for vultures.
Enviros still trying to figure out how to blame it Pres Bush.
Nor of all the women Clinton raped, abused, harrassed, etc, etc.
No sarcasim intended. I hadn’d heard about the vulture problem in India. In the U.S. Congress yes, but not in India.
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