Primary Topic
This episode delves into the significant decline of vulture populations in India and the diverse conservation efforts aimed at reversing this trend.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Vulture populations in India have plummeted due to the use of vulture-toxic drugs, with a staggering decline of up to 99% in some species.
- Conservation efforts, including the establishment of breeding centers and the promotion of vulture-safe drugs, have stabilized but not significantly increased vulture populations.
- The ecological role of vultures as a keystone species is critical, influencing public health and other animal populations.
- The episode details the intensive care and complex operations involved in vulture conservation efforts, including the daily challenges faced by conservationists.
- The broader social and economic impacts of the decline in vulture populations, including increased feral dog populations and associated risks such as rabies, highlight the interconnectedness of species.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction
The episode opens with an introduction to the vulture conservation issue, focusing on the drastic decline in their populations and its broader implications. Roman Mars: "Vultures play a critical role in our ecological system, which is now under great threat."
2: Conservation Efforts
This chapter discusses the various conservation strategies being employed to save the vultures, including breeding and safe zones. Nikita Prakash: "Our efforts are a testament to our dedication to preserving what remains of these crucial species."
3: Challenges and Impact
The focus shifts to the challenges of conservation and the significant ecological impact of vultures, detailing how their decline affects other species and human populations. Vibhu Prakash: "The decline of vultures has a cascading effect on the entire ecosystem."
4: Future Prospects
Discussion of what the future holds for vultures and the possible outcomes of conservation efforts. Lasha Madan: "The path forward is uncertain, but our resolve to save these birds remains strong."
Actionable Advice
- Support local and global wildlife conservation efforts by donating or volunteering.
- Advocate for and use wildlife-safe products, including pharmaceuticals that do not harm vultures.
- Educate others about the importance of biodiversity and species like vultures.
- Participate in community-based conservation initiatives to help create safer environments for wildlife.
- Stay informed about environmental issues and support policies that promote sustainable practices and biodiversity conservation.
About This Episode
Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lasha Madan and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good.
On the one hand, it's a very specific story, it's about a unique set of circumstances that happened to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant. Because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there’s a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something we are on track to see more of in these times. Lasha Madan collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in their reporting but it didn't quite fit into the original story that we wanted to tell but it's so vital and interesting that we're releasing this bonus episode to cover it all.
People
Vibhu Prakash, Nikita Prakash, Lasha Madan, Munir Varani
Companies
Leave blank if none.
Books
Leave blank if none.
Guest Name(s):
Leave blank if no guest.
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
Roman Mars
Better work presentations are possible that are called canva presentations. You can supercharge your work decks with AI powered canva presentations. Just start with a prompt and canva presentations will generate captivating slides in seconds. Or start with a stunning template and add images, graphics, charts and data visualizations from their massive media library. You save time and wow your audience.
There's a reason why Canva is used by 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. So nail your next work presentation with canva presentations by heading to Canva designed. For work this episode is brought to. You by PNC bank some things should be boring, like banking. Boring is safe and reliable.
You don't want your bank to be surprising. Surprising is for podcasts about seemingly insignificant inventions that impact our lives, not banks. PNC bank strives to be boring with your money so you can be happily fulfilled with your life. PNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865 brilliantly boring since 1865 is a service mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNc Bank National Bank association member, FDIC this is a 99% invisible bonus episode.
I'm Roman Mars. Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the parsees in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own lashmadawn, and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it.
It's so good. It's so worth your time. On the one hand, it's a very specific story. It's about a unique set of circumstances that happen to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world.
It's about how we might react when there's a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly, it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something that we are on track to see more of in these times. And you, Lasha, collected a ton of information about vulture conservation and your reporting, and it didn't quite fit into the story that we wanted to tell. But it is so vital and so interesting that I wanted to have you on to talk more about that stuff specifically. So where we left off in the episode, there's this hope that the vultures might one day return to the wild in huge numbers.
So I want to start there. What is the deal with vultures in India, both in the wild and in captivity in present day 2024? Yes. Hi Roman. Yeah, there's a lot in here, and there's a lot that didn't quite fit into the main episode that I'm excited to talk about.
Lasha Madan
Yeah. Specifically about all the other ways that humans relate to vultures and all the kind of nerdy stuff about vulture conservation happening right now. So there were three different species that experienced a dramatic decline between 95, 99%. Today, there are eight vulture conservation and. Breeding centers in India, and there are.
Nikita Prakash
A total of about 800 vultures in captivity. Okay. It's estimated that throughout India, there were. Once about 40 million vultures in the wild. Today, that number is in the thousands.
Roman Mars
Oh, my God. And 800 vultures in captivity might sound like a small number, but it should be said that without vulture conservation, these. Vultures would have been completely extinct by now. So today, thanks to a number of. Factors, the banning of vulture toxic drugs.
Nikita Prakash
Public campaigns to use vulture safe drugs, and all the work at these conservation. Centers to slowly and patiently breed healthy vultures, vulture populations in India are not declining. They're not facing extinction. The populations across vulture species have stabilized, but we're not seeing a wholesale increase in the vulture population. So it's not like we can say the work is over and test releases of these captive vultures are happening.
But as we left off in the story, it's largely a waiting game, because. Vulture toxic drugs are still out there in the wild. Yeah. And so what is the process of vulture conservation? Like, what do they do?
Lasha Madan
Yeah. So I was lucky enough to visit the largest vulture conservation and breeding center. It's in Pinjor, in a state of India called Haryana in north India. And it was opened in 2001 by doctor Vibhu Prakash, who, if you listen to the episode he is, he refutes. The title that he's been given by.
Nikita Prakash
Many people as the vulture king of India. He doesn't like that, but he is considered the leading vulture biologist. He happened to be doing research, kind of begrudgingly, on vultures. He wasn't so interested in vultures at the time. This is before the decline, because he was more interested in species that were rare or harder to find.
And vultures were kind of boring to him because they were just everywhere. And then all of a sudden, he became the person who happened to have so much knowledge because of the research he'd been doing. And so what did the conservation center actually look like? It didn't look quite like what I. Expected it to look like.
Vibhu Prakash
It was a bunch of concrete warehouses, essentially. To get there, I drove down, or I was driven down a very windy road we got lost so many times that we had to stop, pull over multiple times and ask people, hey, do you know where the Vulture conservation center is? Nobody knew what we were talking about. And there's also no signage. By the way, if you remember from.
Nikita Prakash
The episode, vultures are easily freaked out by humans. Vultures will vomit as a response to. Being close to humans. It can also interrupt their laying pattern. All to say that conservationists don't really.
Munir Varani
Want these centers to attract a ton of attention or for them to randomly get curious visitors. I see. Which for me meant that it was hard to find. But eventually I did get there and. I was given a tour by Nikita Prakash.
Nikita currently runs the center. She also happens to be the wife of Vibhu Prakash. Together, they've been involved in vulture research. And conservation for decades. Wow, it's very tall, these aviaries.
Unknown
Yeah, 20ft high, 40ft wide and 100ft long. I mentioned it was the largest. So there's 800 vultures in captivity total throughout India. This center has 400 of them. Oh, wow.
Nikita Prakash
And, you know, there's a bunch of different rooms, a breeding room, there's an incubation room. This is our incubation and brooder room. Shall I show you? From inside, there's a little warehouse looking thing where they house the food for the vultures, which is all goat. So that is our food processing room.
Unknown
When the goats are brought here, then we, according to the number of vultures we prepare and we provide the. And then there's just rows and rows of cement aviaries. You can't really get a clear view of vultures except through these windows that are cut through the cement. And inside, vultures sit on ledges and perches embedded into the walls. There's a roof made of strong metal mesh to make sure that no other animals, like leopards and whatnot, will get inside.
Nikita Prakash
Aviary has four baths that are cleaned twice a week. Also twice a week, the vultures are fed and they're fed through a little door where skinned goat carcasses are just slid through. Wow. This feels like a lot of effort to maintain. Yeah.
I mean, the two of them are so committed. They're so committed to this work. Nikita told me that the religion she practices is called jainism. And in Jainism, you don't eat meat, but in addition to meat, you also don't eat anything that grows underground. So garlic, eggs, onions or eggs don't grow underground, so garlic, onions.
And yet she watches 400 vultures eat skinned goat meat twice a week. With an extreme dedication and yet you. Watch the vultures consume meat, nestlings on goat meat.
And you say that with a big smile. Now I'm used to it. It's very interesting. So there's one other room at the conservation center. It's a pretty simple room.
The biggest thing, the most obvious thing that's in there is a large monitor that has a series of CCTV cameras on them. It's a control room, essentially. And Vibhu and Nikita and a lot of their staff spend a lot of time in there, and this is how they observe vulture behavior. I learned that sometimes vibu would even sleep in the room and occasionally watch the CCTV screen just to make sure. That the vultures are doing okay.
Unknown
Every time an egg is to hatch, he sleeps here to make sure that it hatches. Do you have children? Yeah, we have two boys. All these 400 vultures are kind of like your wild. Your wild?
Lasha Madan
Yeah. I mean, I took care of newborn twins. It sounds exactly the same. You're just, like, always making sure they're alive. Yeah.
Nikita Prakash
And, I mean, the one major difference, I guess, is in their case, the whole future of a species is kind of riding on their dedication. So, yeah, it's a lot. And during the height of COVID in. India, everything was highly militarized and locked down. And so Vibhu and Nikita and their staff really struggled to get to the conservation center because to be able to travel, you needed to move through various checkpoints.
But then they also really struggled to find enough meat, to find enough food for the vultures to survive. And they were really worried. They told me they worked until they wilted during Corona. We were not worried for ourselves. We were worried about the vultures, how food will come for them.
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, we would get nightmare how to get food. And we were contemplating releasing them because we were one week, we could not get food, but release them. Then what will happen? So in spite of all the barriers and restrictions, we would come to the center every day. Every day, and then mobilize the forest department because they can, they have access.
They can give you permission to get food. Wow. And you did it. We did it. You were able to feed the vultures every week.
Every week. So is there a lot of support for the work? Like, do other people recognize how important this is? As you can probably imagine, vultures are not a sexy animal. You know, they dont compare to the amount of attention and money that tiger conservation gets, for example.
Nikita Prakash
And vulture conservation also has to contend with not only public apathy, but active fear. A lot of people fear vultures. I spoke to one vulture biologist who. Told me about a time he was doing research and trapping vultures in a. Particular village in India.
Munir Varani
And he learned that in this area, vultures were such a bad omen that if they were seen to be landing on someone's house, it was thought that what that meant is that someone in that house is going to die. And so what they would do is dismantle that house, move out and build a new home. It's hard to get people who have money, including governments, to see how important vultures are as a keystone species, that their conservation is really important. It's also really expensive because for each goat to go through the testing to make sure that what's in the goat system will not kill the vultures, that's really expensive. And so vulture conservation is contending with just the need for a lot of money.
Lasha Madan
Yeah. So we know that the vultures have always meant a great deal to the parsees in India. But what other changes has the vultures absence brought about to India as a whole? It's changed. You know, the vultures created this void.
Nikita Prakash
Vultures are a keystone species, which means if this species disappears or dramatically reduces in size, it shifts everything. So when vultures were around, there was this very specific cycle that existed in India. Whenever a cow carcass or any other kind of animal carcass would die. The carcasses of animals used to just be left all over the countryside. A cow dies in the field, they'd just leave it, and the vultures would come.
Unknown
Very convenient, very handy. Didn't have to touch it, didn't have to move it. Most of these cows are left to die naturally, and vultures were always the reliable cleanup crew. So a cow would die. Then a group of people in India known as cattle skinners would come and they would skin the cow.
Nikita Prakash
Often they'd be on call. These skinners would show up with a crew. Sometimes the skinners would find work by just looking at the sky and seeing where, looking at the general area that vultures were beginning to circle. That makes sense. This work is hard, and often it's this kind of work that you inherit through the caste system.
Often this work is designated to people who are lower caste, and this is how they make their living. They sell the hide to the leather industry. But this process also, interestingly, helps the vultures. The vultures don't need their food to be skinned, but once it's skinned, it makes it easier for vultures to access the meat, because vulture beaks actually can't penetrate cattle skin. It's too tough.
And so they access the innards only through the eyes and the mouth and such. Oh, goodness. So it's a little bit messier. It takes more time. So it's not, like, a necessity, but it helps them out a little bit.
Lasha Madan
Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. And so, okay, so the cow dies, the skinners come, and now the vultures are here. Once the vultures do their job, a separate group of workers called bone collectors come, and they collect the bones that. Are left, and they sell these bones.
Nikita Prakash
And that's how they make their money. And these bones are mostly sold to fertilizer companies. Wow. So it's this whole economic cycle all around the natural death of a cow. Exactly.
Munir Varani
So when the vultures stopped coming, this. Cycle broke, and there was an attempt. To implement a system called carcass dump sites, essentially carcass landfills on the outskirts of towns and villages. And when the vultures stopped coming, most towns and villages started creating these carcass dumps. Like, they collect.
Unknown
New jobs came up. They collect the carcasses, they dump them in this one area. But these carcass dump sites led to a new problem. Now, when animals die, livestock dies. They're taken to these carcass dump sites, where piles of cows and buffaloes and livestock are there.
Lasha Madan
And so who is this? This is Munir Varani. He is a raptor biologist who worked alongside Vibhu Prakash and dozens of other scientists back in the early two thousands to conclude that diclofenac was the thing that killed the vultures. I remember that you would not see vultures at these carcass dumpsites, and you would see thousands of feral dogs. They looked vicious.
Unknown
I mean, it was a scary thing. So Munir told me that these dump sites essentially became a breeding ground for feral dogs. Dogs started to breed even inside the rib cages of these cow carcasses. Oh, my God. Lasha.
Nikita Prakash
Roman, I have photos, and I could share them with you. Okay. Okay. I feel like I almost don't need to. You can imagine.
Lasha Madan
No, I got it. So it was actually found that the population of feral dogs across India increased by 5.5 million in the same time period that the vulture population was rapidly declining in the 1990s and early two thousands. And, Roman, I don't know if you know this, but vultures only ever go after dead things. They never attack the living. Yeah, but I imagine dogs do.
Nikita Prakash
Dogs do. They actually. They prey on the living. Dogs also transmit rabies. And in India, rabies is a real concern.
It's been a real concern for a long time. India has the highest number of rabies related deaths in the world. There's a very strong correlation between the decline in vultures and the number of cases of rabies that have gone up. I mean, dog numbers have just skyrocketed because there's a superabundance of food now that is available that vultures used to get rid of in the past. And I imagine that the dogs are not these efficient, clean eaters the way the vultures are.
Roman Mars
Right. They really just make a mess. My dog makes an incredible mess. You're right. Unlike vultures, dogs really anything else that would go for the carcass.
Nikita Prakash
So dogs, rats, other birds of prey, like we mentioned in the episode kites and crows, none of these animals are able to consume a carcass in. They're picky. And so what this means is two things happen environmentally. The first is that these dogs, they are more likely to transmit the diseases that the vultures have historically prevented from spreading. Remember that the vulture's stomach is actually more acidic than battery acid.
Lasha Madan
Whoa. It can consume all the gnarly stuff. And just kill it. It can kill it inside its body. Right.
Nikita Prakash
But these dogs, they just pass on these diseases, and so it leads to potentially higher rates of infection. Yeah, yeah. And the second thing, the second kind of big environmental consequence is that because there's no other animal that consumes an entire carcass, there's this risk that the dead carcass matter. Whatever is in it, a disease or. Whatever, it can spread into the water and the soil.
It can leach into the water and the soil because the remains are not totally gone. And so it's a whole mess. Yeah, I mean, this is what you mean by keystone species. I mean, just like, the whole system collapses. And the thing is that it's not something that is so visible to the human eye right away.
You know, the thing that I found so compelling about the parsi experience when it comes to vultures is that it's so tangible. And sometimes, you know, in order for humans to care and to really see a change, it needs to be really in your face. And I think that's what made it so compelling. But all of this stuff is also happening in the background. That's a little bit harder to see.
Vibhu Prakash
That we should also care about. Yeah. Recently, there were two environmental economists who published this big body of work looking at vultures in India and the environmental consequences and economic consequences of vultures in India. They found that, on average, human death rates supposedly increased by more than 4% in what they call vulture suitable districts after these birds nearly went extinct. So what they mean is that in the areas that they surveyed where vultures used to exist in high numbers and are now no longer there, the general mortality rate has seemed to increase by 4%.
Nikita Prakash
A large portion of this is attributed to rabies, but it could be, you know, all sorts of reasons for mortality. And they also found evidence that there's been an increase in feral dog populations and rabies and lower water quality in these regions. Wow. Okay. So it's clear that these vultures have left a void when it comes to waste management in India.
Roman Mars
And they operated as this kind of immune system for the country. Yeah. And so what do you do now? How do you fill this void? Cause clearly, the dogs aren't doing it and the carcass dumps aren't doing it.
Like, what do you do? Yeah, it's almost making it. I mean, it's making it worse. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Nikita Prakash
It's a really tough and interesting problem. So what I found is that municipal. Governments all over India, not all, but. Some, have been trying to figure out how to implement sustainable infrastructure to do the job that vultures did for millennia when it comes to waste management and sanitation services that the vultures provided. And so there are municipalities that are grappling with questions like, do we incinerate cows to prevent disease from spreading?
If we do, what are the kind of infrastructural hoops we need to go through to, like, one, make sure that people will do this once we build it? Or should we bury them? Should we make carcass dump sites the official solution, and somehow try to prevent. Dogs from getting in or something. So different places in India are trying different possibilities, but each idea comes with its own set of hurdles.
Munir Varani
Burial and incineration cost money. And if the burden is on the farmer or the cattle owner to pay for disposing of its dead cattle when prior to this ecological shift, they had to do absolutely nothing, are they going to. Munir actually told me that some people just dump their dead animals into the gunga because it's the cheapest option. And so youve got these bloated carcasses now just floating down the river. Oh, dear God.
Roman Mars
Thats an awful image of a bloated cow carcass floating down the river. Yeah. And what were seeing, too, is that as Indias governments grapple with creating and implementing a new system of infrastructure, these systems will very likely, and in some places already have put the jobs of those cattle skinners and bone collectors at. Risk, because if cows are being shipped. Off to an incineration center, they don't need to be skinned anymore.
So is there any hope to take these 800 vultures that are in captivity and release them and begin to solve some of these problems, at least in a small way? It's a really thin line between wanting to release these vultures and not wanting to send them off to their death. As mentioned in the main episode, these drugs, these toxic drugs are still out there, and they're increasing in number, and some of them are slowly getting banned. Two of these newer toxic drugs were banned in 2023. But again, we also learned that banning a drug doesn't necessarily equal, equal to the eradication of the drug in the environment.
Nikita Prakash
Yeah. And this is the thing that biologists who are behind this conservation work are really, really grappling with, because they can't. Control the drugs in the wider populace at all. Yeah. So the main vulture conservation center, the.
Vibhu Prakash
One I visited, it's formally called the. Jatayu Conservation and Breeding center in Punjab. And that name, Jatayu, it references a particular hindu myth about a vulture God named Jatayu. In hindu mythology, there's a vulture king, and he sacrifices his life to save a suffering human. He was thought to have lived for over 6000 years.
Nikita Prakash
This vulture king was known for his kind heart and his strong wings. And one day he tries to save a human life, but in return, he was wounded, his wings were cut, and he was left to die in abject pain. Oh. I mean, that is interesting that they chose that as a name, because that's the story of a vulture ultimately dying, but it's also this reminder of the fate that they're trying to avoid. Yeah.
And I think one thing I found kind of clever is that they use this myth about Jatayu in their public messaging. So they go often from village to village and talk to people and try and get people to care about vultures. Referencing this story, which is for a. Lot of people in India, it's like. One of their main kind of reference points for vultures.
It's kind of the one positive one, you know what I mean? So Vibhu told me that they're constantly working to persuade farmers to not use black market diclofenac or other toxic drugs. Vebu's team collects carcass samples, and they do routine drug tests. They find safe alternatives, and they lobby the government and pharmaceutical companies to sell those instead. They also go undercover in drugstores, pretending to be a farmer with a sick cow.
And they'll see if doctors still prescribe all these toxic drugs. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, it's really hands on work. Yeah.
Roman Mars
I mean, they're really fighting on all fronts. I mean, just God bless them. They've also implemented something across the country called vulture safe zones, or vs. So these vs. Like that areas where there's a hundred kilometer radius area where they really, really work hard with the farmers and everybody else to make sure that that area is diclofenac free.
Nikita Prakash
They've already started doing some test releases in these areas, and the idea is. That let's start somewhere and maybe one day it'll be safe to fully release these birds. Yeah, but I mean, the big problem with that is that vultures can fly, and I imagine they fly a lot farther than 100 km. They can. Yeah.
And so it's this interesting thing where the strategy is to create this zone, but ultimately, it's an imaginary zone. It's an imaginary line that it's not like the vultures are aware of this, but Vibhu and others will tell you that at least it's something. Yeah, I'm glad that they're trying something. And so what's going on with vultures beyond India? Yeah.
Every country in South Asia is on its own journey, and it's slightly different because, you know, the governments will make different decisions. There's a lot of different kind of. Forces at play that mean that every country kind of is seeing a different version of this. An interesting success story, though, is Nepal. It's hard to compare the two countries, Nepal and India, because India is much larger.
The catastrophe was also much larger. There were more vultures there. But also diclofenac came on the market in India several years before Nepal. And so by the time they found that diclofenac was the problem, there was just a little bit more time. They had more time before a total collapse happened in Nepal.
But Nepal has taken on a really interesting strategy that a lot of people point to as one of the reasons for its success. Besides vulture safe zones and captive breeding, which they have also in Nepal, they also have a community led effort called vulture restaurants. Okay. It's not a new concept. It was borrowed from conservation work in Europe and in Africa.
Vibhu Prakash
But vulture restaurants are essentially areas out. In the open, in fields, so not in captivity, where the vultures have gotten used to food being provided for them, specifically drug safe food. So people will go test these drugs and bring a bunch of food, and it's even become kind of a way to boost local economies, it's turned into kind of a tourist attraction where people will come, they'll pay some money to watch these vultures eat. It's a thing that vultures have gotten used to. Like, okay, here and here and here are reliable sources of consistent food.
Nikita Prakash
I'm gonna go here instead of needing to look for my own food. Even though it's out in the wild, it's been effective.
Roman Mars
And so what do you think the future is gonna hold for vultures in India? I think what's clear is that the population of vultures in India is never gonna go back to what it once was, even if the population is stable and healthy. And that's because humans and animals were continuously adapting. And now that the vultures are gone, cities and states in India are grappling with what to do with their dead cows that are just lying open, and they're trying to corner them off and put them in these dump sites or in these incinerators. What that means for vultures, should they.
Nikita Prakash
Return, is that their food supply will be dramatically reduced. And in their absence, we're gonna. We need to adapt. You know, we need to figure out a new system. And so it's this back and forth.
It's this continuous thing when it comes. To thinking about the future of vultures in India. I think an image that I just wanna leave you with is an image that Vibhu left me with, which is. That in the future, should we see, you know, successful releases of these vultures, even if they all get released, the reality is that they might not survive in urban areas. They might not flock to urban areas anymore, like places like Dungarvati in Mumbai, for example, because there's so many other things that are in the way.
You know, these high rise buildings that. Are blocking their flight path. The country of India is going through this rapid process of electrification, and so all of these wires are in the way of the vultures, you know, and that maybe what the future holds is that vultures kind of cordon themselves off to areas that are more protected, that are more wild. They stay on the mountains, the cliffsides. They stay in the forests.
Unknown
30 years ago, vultures could survive in Delhi, but now they cannot. So now, ultimately, vultures will be confined to protected areas. That is going to happen. I asked Vibhu how the prospect of this made him feel. You know, in his childhood, he was.
Munir Varani
So used to seeing vultures just everywhere. So many people were. But what if vultures never returned to these places? I think that will be good. They had done a good service for us when we didn't have the resources.
Unknown
Now we have to take care of the cattle ourselves. Yeah, we've proven ourselves to be not very good neighbors, so for their own sake, maybe they should just stay away for their own good. This is really fascinating. Lasha, thank you so much for this, like, extra time and just the beautiful story that you produced and all this extra information. I love this stuff.
Roman Mars
It makes me so happy to learn and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about it. Thanks so much. This was really fun.
This bonus episode of 99% Invisible was reported by Lashmadan, was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation, Howard G. Buffett fund for women journalists mix by Hazik bin Ahmad Farid, music by Swan Royale thanks to this episode's vulture experts, Vibhu and Nikita Prakash, Mira Subramanian and Munir Varani. If you wanna learn more about vultures, I highly recommend you go and follow all of their work. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor.
The rest of the team includes Chris Borube, Jason de Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Ley, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney Kelly Prime, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Sarah Bake, Christopher Johnson, Nina Pawtuck and me. Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server.
There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99 PI.org.