Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price.
The near-extinction of vultures in India has had severe consequences.
Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price.As vultures vanished, dogs multiplied, and rabies spread. Humans are living with the consequences.Johnson traveled to Bikaner, Hyderabad and Bangalore to report this story. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center....moreJohnson traveled to Bikaner, Hyderabad and Bangalore to report this story. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center....moreNovember 29, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EST8 minutes agoBIKANER, India — Dogs roam a field of cattle carcasses at the Jorbeer dump in northern India, passing hollowed-out rib cages and tugging at pink flesh decaying in the sun. Nearby, workers skin hides for leather from the 40 carcasses that arrive daily, fighting heat and a suffocating stench.Competing with the dogs for carrion and circling the hazy skies above are vultures, remnants of a population almost completely wiped out by humans. Between 1992 and 2007, the populations of three species — the long-billed vulture, slender-billed vulture and white-rumped vulture — plummeted more than 100-fold from roughly 4 million to 32,000. The speed of the birds’ decline, scientists say, rivals the passenger pigeon’s plunge from 3 billion or more in the early 1800s to extinction in 1914.Some 800 miles south of the dump, in the city of Hyderabad, a slender boy named Maniteja, 7, lies beneath a pink blanket, unresponsive, breathing through a ventilator. His dark eyes drift. For nine months, no words have come from his lips, only small cries. The family leaves a window open, hoping the sounds of friends playing outside will pierce the fog and restore him to consciousness.A woman with other patients who have been bitten by a dog at Government Fever Hospital in Hyderabad, India. Syringes for treatment of dog bites at the only hospital in India dedicated to treating patients with infectious diseases, communicable diseases and dog bites. Last December, one of India’s estimated 62 million free-ranging dogs ― a population that surged as the vultures declined ― lunged at Maniteja and sank its teeth into his left shoulder. Although his parents got him vaccinated against rabies within an hour, a few weeks later the boy became feverish. On Jan. 18, a doctor asked if he knew the man beside him. “My papa,” Maniteja said, his last words before losing the ability to speak.The decimated vultures competing for dead cattle, the dogs that have become their rivals and the boy fighting for his life all form links in an ecological chain reaction, according to scientists. The sequence, triggered by human action that took a decade to identify, carries a warning as we drive Earth deeper into what many scientists consider to be a sixth mass extinction.When we endanger other species, we endanger ourselves.Dogs fight to claim their stake at carcasses, surrounded by vultures and other birds at the Jorbeer dump in northern India. Dogs, vultures and other birds descend upon carcasses of dead animals left at the Jorbeer dump site. A 2008 paper in the journal Ecological Economics found that between 1992 and 2007 the loss of vultures in India led to an estimated increase of about 5.5 million dogs, 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.A paper published a year ago in the American Economic Review concluded that in certain districts, “the functional extinction of vultures — efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment — increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.”That analysis considered not just rabies, but all human deaths related to the loss of vultures — including those from water contaminated by cattle carcasses. Researchers estimated that India suffered, on average, 104,386 additional deaths, and almost $70 billion in extra costs, each year.50 Species that Save UsThis series highlights emerging research on how plants and animals protect human health – and how their disappearance is already sickening thousands of people around the world.India has fought back, banning veterinary use of some chemicals harmful to vultures, establishing programs to protect the birds and launching campaigns to immunize free-ranging dogs against rabies. Conservationists even set up a few “vulture restaurants,” serving cow carcasses known to be safe for consumption.But the damage is hard to reverse.Vultures still face some toxic exposure, though at a lower level, and India’s push to modernize has added new threats: power lines and wind turbines. Captive-breeding programs are slow; vultures breed once a year, usually producing a single egg.“If you take 100 people from any city, it is very unlikely you will get anyone who will say they have seen a vulture,” said Chetan Misher, a wildlife researcher and ecologist who has been working in western India for the past decade.“If it remains like this for a long time, people will think they are imaginary birds.”The loss of vultures is all the more surprising given India’s reverence for animals.It is a country “that believes humans and animals coexist,” explained Kedar Girish Gore, director of the nonprofit Corbett Foundation in Mumbai, which is dedicated to wildlife conservation and environmental awareness.Signs of coexistence are everywhere. In the northwestern state of Rajasthan and in cities like Hyderabad in the south, cars, trucks and motorcycles share crowded roadways with free-ranging dogs and cattle, goats, schoolchildren and other pedestrians.Cows are revered: It is illegal in many states to kill them, even if they’re old or injured. Instead, people bring them to retirement homes called gaushalas where the cattle are fed and cared for by workers who consider it a sacred duty.“The main slogan in India is, ‘A cow is our mother,’” said Shree Gopalacharya, who manages a gaushala in Rajasthan where 70 workers care for about 1,800 bulls.In cities like Delhi, people put out chapati and milk for street dogs. Some even cook and distribute large amounts of chicken biryani, enough to feed up to 200 dogs, said Nishant Kumar, a DBT/Wellcome Trust fellow at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.Rahul Malik, 27, administers anti-rabies vaccination to stray dogs in Noida, India. Stray dogs loiter in the neighborhood of Nizamuddin East in Delhi. Even vultures, a bird many in the West consider ugly and use as a metaphor for people who prey on others, enjoy widespread respect in India.Followers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian faith, place their dead atop Towers of Silence for vultures to consume, thus freeing the soul without polluting the sacred elements: earth, fire and water.A vulture is even one of the heroes of Hindu mythology: Jatayu, the vulture demigod, sacrificed his life to save the goddess Sita.“The lesson we learn here is that every species, vultures included, no matter how ugly we think they are, they have sacrificed something that we as humans must decipher,” said Munir Virani, chief executive of the Mohamed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. “They are giving us a warning.”For centuries, vultures provided a highly efficient sanitation system, cleaning the carcasses of millions of dead cattle.“You could argue that the way of life of Indian livestock farming kind of developed hand-in-hand with vultures,” said John Mallord, who works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain. “Without the vultures to clean up the environment, people wouldn’t have been able to just leave the cows where they [died] because it would have proved to be a disease threat.”Although other animals scavenge dead cattle, none do so as effectively as vultures. The birds will pick clean a bull carcass in 30 to 40 minutes.Vultures and humans have long collaborated on disposal of dead cattle. Workers removed the hides for leather, leaving the meat more accessible to birds. Vultures then cleaned the carcasses, leaving bones to be harvested by a second group of workers. Collectors sold the bones for use in fertilizer and animal feed.Biologists once counted India’s vultures among the world’s most common birds of prey. The birds often nested in gardens with large trees, including some foreign embassies, said Rhys Green, an honorary professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge.Large numbers of vultures in India, seen in a 1967 photo. (Paolo Koch/Getty Images)A herd of cattle wait outside a cattle shed in Surdhana, India. Virani remembers being on a cricket tour in the late 1980s and walking along Malabar Hill in what was then Bombay, staring into a vulture-filled sky.“There could have been thousands,” he said.But in the mid-1990s letters began appearing in the Times of India noting the vultures’ disappearance. When people did see the birds, something seemed off.“They wouldn’t be flying around as they normally do. They would just sit there,” Green said. “The head and neck were pointing downwards, which is a thing vultures do when they’re sick.”The scale of the loss was staggering. If vultures were unable to breed in a given year, the overall population would decline about 5 percent, Green said. But road surveys showed that the three vulture species were declining far more rapidly, at rates of between 2o percent and 50 percent each year for many successive years. Between 1992 and 2007, the population of 2.9 million white-rumped vultures in India declined by 99.9 percent.Similar losses were occurring in Pakistan and Nepal.Vibhu Prakash, who worked for the Bombay Natural History Society and had been conducting vulture counts in a national park, sounded the alarm. His papers in biological journals in 1999 and 2003 raised a question no one could answer: What was killing the birds?To solve the mystery, a team of researchers led by American veterinary pathologist J. Lindsay Oaks performed meticulous postmortems on dead white-rumped vultures in Pakistan. They found that 85 percent had visceral gout, which can occur when birds’ kidneys fail.Oaks, who would die in 2011, knew that painkillers called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories caused kidney failure in certain birds of prey. When members of Oaks’s team surveyed dozens of veterinarians and drug retailers, they learned of a livestock medicine that was toxic to kidneys: diclofenac. The painkiller, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory also given to humans, was widely used to treat sick and dying cattle for pain, fever and inflammation.Laborers skin the carcasses of dead animals even as dogs feed on them at the Jorbeer dump yard in northern India. Scientists tested a subset of the dead vultures, comparing those that had visceral gout with those that did not. Tests revealed diclofenac residue in every bird with kidney failure. Every dead bird that contained no diclofenac showed no signs of kidney failure. When they fed 20 vultures meat from animals treated with various doses of diclofenac, 13 died of renal failure.The timing made sense. The drug’s main international patent had expired in 1993, leading to the approval of cheaper generic versions in India.Vultures diagramAfter the journal Nature published Oaks’s results, other researchers confirmed his findings, and conservationists held conferences on the fate of the vultures. In 2006, Green and the Indian Veterinary Research Institute identified meloxicam as a painkiller safe for vultures.The Indian government enacted a ban on veterinary use of diclofenac that took effect in May 2006, a little more than two years after the drug was found to be lethal to the birds. Pakistan and Nepal issued bans of their own in 2006.“That is actually very quick for how these things work,” Green said. The United States took a decade to ban DDT after the book “Silent Spring” showed the harm pesticides were doing to birds and other wildlife.Even after the diclofenac ban, the number of vultures continued to decline, reaching 19,000 in 2015. Subsequently, three more painkillers given to cows were found to be toxic to vultures and were banned in India.Rabies and the rise of the dogsAs scientists sought an explanation for the vulture decline, the ecosystem changed dramatically.“Dogs have replaced vultures as the main scavenger at carcass dumps monitored,” according to the 2008 paper in Ecological Economics. “It is thus reasonable to assume that the increase in dogs has partially resulted from the decline in vultures.”Estimates of the nation’s dog population vary widely ― anywhere from 15 million in India’s 2019 Livestock Census to as high as 80 million in some news reports. The most common figure is about 62 million.More dogs, researchers found, translated into more dog bites and more deaths from rabies in a country that accounts for 36 percent of worldwide deaths from the disease.Before 1960, rabies killed several hundred people a year in the U.S. Widespread vaccination of pets, however, reduced human deaths to a rarity; in 2024, there were only four deaths in the U.S., none caused by dog bites.A woman waits for her turn to receive treatment for a dog bite in the emergency room at Government Fever Hospital in Hyderabad. The hospital has received 32 cases of rabies this year through mid-November. A man who was bitten by a dog receives treatment at the hospital. In India, someone is bitten by a dog every two seconds, and 18,000 to 20,000 people die each year of rabies, according to the World Health Organization (though the Indian government reported just 54 deaths from rabies in 2024). The government introduced an ambitious rabies plan in 2021 that set a goal of eliminating human deaths from the disease by 2030.Rabies, which has a fatality rate approaching 100 percent, is transmitted through saliva. Once the virus enters the body it creeps along the nerves into the central nervous system, producing fever, nausea, flu-like symptoms and finally coma and death.“By the time the patients come with symptoms you are at the point of no return,” said Lokesh Lingappa, a doctor who has treated the disease at Rainbow Children’s Hospital in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills.He recalls the case of a 5-year-old boy whose parents brought him to the hospital with only a scratch. They had not even seen a dog bite the boy, Lingappa said, “but maybe there was a lick on some open cut.”A boy who got a dog bite cries as he receives treatment at the hospital. The child, who had not been vaccinated, soon developed aerophobia, an intense fear of puffs of fresh air and a symptom of rabies. The parents “wanted us to say this is not rabies,” Lingappa recalled; he had to tell them that it was. The boy died a week later.In Hyderabad, Maniteja’s relatives watch his bedside in shifts covering every hour of every day. The boy’s mother starts at 6 in the morning and does not finish until 11 at night. She prepares his liquid feedings ― rice water, carrot juice and vegetable soup.Maniteja’s father watches him from 11 at night until 3 in the morning, when an uncle takes over for the last three hours. Before the dog bite, the boy played with friends and rode his bicycle. Today, he receives 30-minute physical therapy sessions.To care for Maniteja at home, his family rents medical equipment at a cost of about $900 a month. The father’s job in technical support pays up to $800 a month, leaving money a constant worry. “What can we do?” the father said.The boy cannot recognize his mother and father at his bedside. Sometimes his father strokes his forehead calling, “Maniteja? Maniteja? Maniteja?” searching for some response. “My heart is breaking watching my child like this,” his father said.A hospital staff member looks at the queue of patients. Free-ranging dogs have long posed a challenge for India.“There is a dog right next to the place where we have our research camp in Delhi, and it has bitten 150 people, probably more in the last three years,” Kumar explained. “And you cannot remove the dog because that dog is protected by the people who love it.”In the summer, India’s Supreme Court ordered authorities in Delhi and its suburbs to round up all street dogs and put them in shelters, then modified the order after criticism. Strays must now be taken to shelters, immunized and sterilized, but then returned to the streets they live on.Kumar said the Indian concept of “community dogs” that live in a neighborhood is complex, and it varies according to economic means, where people live, and many other factors.In a research paper yet to be published, Kumar noted, “We are witnessing two parallel realities: visible acts of kindness masking invisible cycles of suffering.”Stemming vulture extinctionA few hours southwest of Bangalore, 25 to 30 breeding pairs of long-billed vultures, also known as Indian vultures, once nested in the cliffs at the Ramadevarabetta Vulture Sanctuary.“That was over 30 years ago, and now we are down to just one breeding pair,” said Chris Bowden, vulture conservation program manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “We’re hoping those vultures will come back later this evening because they generally roost here.”On a hot day in early October, hours passed, and the pair was never spotted in the country’s only designated vulture sanctuary. It is uncertain whether long-billed vultures in the area will rebuild from the single pair.“We hope they will,” said Bowden, who advises the Saving Asia’s Vultures From Extinction consortium. But protecting them in “this spectacular rocky landscape is not enough to protect them from the main threats.”Green and others have carried out undercover surveys of Indian pharmacies to see how many still sell diclofenac for veterinary use. While more veterinarians are now using vulture-safe meloxicam, Green said, “the amount of toxic diclofenac in cattle didn’t go down to zero.” The problem, he said, has been a lack of awareness and enforcement.Conservationists have also taken steps to discourage deliberate poisonings, a practice in which farmers who have suffered livestock losses from other predators put out poison bait. Vultures die by consuming either the bait or the bodies of poisoned predators.Birds claim their stake to the remains of a dead animal at the Jorbeer dump site. Birds and dogs surround a landscape of carcasses of dead animals at the Jorbeer dump site. For 20 years, the Corbett Foundation has provided immediate compensation to farmers who lose livestock to predators. Gore, the director, estimates the group has paid out for about 20,000 livestock kills.Yet experts say it is unlikely the vulture will ever play the role it once did, a role the Madras High Court once as described as not a scavenger, but a “natural sanitary worker.”Some people now bury cattle carcasses, putting them out of the reach of vultures. When carcasses are left in the open at places like the Jorbeer dump, the competition can be fierce. Misher, the ecologist in western India, has watched dogs harass and chase vultures.Mallord at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said the vultures’ population crash is over, though “it’s too early to crack open the bottle of champagne.”It once seemed unthinkable that birds as common as India’s vultures could approach extinction. But the same was true of the passenger pigeon, Mallord said.“Nothing’s safe.”About this storyPhotography by Saumya Khandelwal. G.B.S.N.P. Varma contributed to this report. Design, development and illustrations by Hailey Haymond. Editing by Lynh Bui, Maya Valentine, Joe Moore and Juliet Eilperin. Copy editing by Dorine Bethea.
