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From the January 2002 Fortean Times:
Dead Parsees are carried on a simple bier to a ceremonial gate into the private jungle park of banyan and casarina trees in the city's posh Malabar Hill district, wich surrounds the five Towers of Silence... However, with an average of three Parsees dying every day, the six-odd vultures at the towers are overfed and unable to cope, although kites and other birds help out.

26 posted on 09/13/2006 10:39:55 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Saturday, September 2, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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dead link, try the Wayback Machine (that has worked in the past):
All consuming faith: To keep an ancient custom, India's Parsees need to protect their vultures
by Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist
5 August 2000
Parsees are the religious descendants of the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia. They believe that earth, water and fire are sacred and must not be defiled by corpses. So they put their dead in funerary sites where hundreds of griffon vultures perform the disposal job. The funerary site of the prosperous Parsees of Bombay is known as the Towers of Silence, a well-known landmark in the city next to the Hanging Gardens Park on upmarket Malabar Hill.

But vultures from the griffon genus have all but disappeared across much of India over the past few years (see p 32). Poisoning with the insecticide DDT, widely used in India, was initially suspected. But that would be unlikely to affect only one genus of vulture, or to cause such an abrupt and widespread die-off, says Andrew Cunningham, a veterinary pathologist with London's Zoological Society. A more likely culprit is infectious disease, and last spring Cunningham found signs of viral infection in some vulture carcasses.

27 posted on 09/13/2006 10:44:01 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Saturday, September 2, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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