What if your religion required you to be eaten by vultures after you died, but all the vultures suddenly disappeared?
A look at the twilight of contemporary Zoroastrianism and India's vulture crisis.
A look at the twilight of contemporary Zoroastrianism and India's vulture crisis.
After the Muslim conquest of Persia in the mid 600's AD, followers of the Zoroastrian religion fled to India. They were granted refuge in Gujarat and became known as the Parsis.
In keeping with the teachings of Zarathustra, the Parsi insist on a form of sky burial known as 'Dokhmenashini', whereby the body is exposed and consumed by vultures. This prevents the contamination of the elements by the polluting effect of the corpse.
Ritual circular structures called 'dakhmas' were built by Zoroastrians to keep this process hidden and sanitary. Also known as the Towers of Silence, the Parsi of India have maintained this tradition to the present day.
The towers are roofless circular buildings, about 300ft in diameter and 18ft high, with a single iron door. Bodies are placed on the interior plinth, men on the outside, women in the middle and children near the central pit.
A flock of vultures will strip a corpse in about half an hour, leaving behind the bones which are swept into the 'bhandar' pit, to be sun bleached before removal for burial. Only the Parsi 'untouchable' sub-caste, the 'khandhias', actually handle the human remains
This process, of excarnation by vulture, has lasted for millennia. But it has rapidly found itself under threat, due to the simple and shocking fact that around 99% of southeast Asia's vultures have disappeared since the mid 1990's.
To give but one example - it was estimated that, as recently as the 1980's, thirty million white -backed vultures once coasted on thermals above southeast Asia. Now there are just eleven thousand.
What happened?
What happened?
The mystery of the vanishing vultures has been researched for decades, but in 2003 a convincing answer was found. During the 1990's Indian farmers, amongst others, had started treating their livestock with an aspirin-like drug called diclofenac.
Diclofenac is a mild painkiller, but in vultures it causes the accumulation of uric acid crystals in the organs. Acute renal necrosis and visceral gout then kill the bird unlucky enough to feed upon any treated deceased animal.
Despite a veterinary ban on diclofenac in 2006 in India, Nepal and Pakistan, it remains a widespread and popular medicine. This has had profound biological consequences in India, a nation with over 500 million cattle and a majority religion which does not eat them.
Vultures are a 'metabolic dead end' for pathogens, truly nature's most efficient way to clean the land of diseased carcasses. Now with no vultures, wild dogs and rats are free to carry rabies, plague and anthrax. Over half of SE Asia's rabies deaths occur in India.
So where does this leave the Parsi population, who rely so heavily on the vulture?
Without vultures, corpses now take months and not minutes to be properly stripped to the bone. This has prompted the use of solar dryers in the Towers to help speed up the decomposition process.
But ultimately the Parsi are now facing the annihilation of this ancient custom, and some are now considering the previously unthinkable - cremation.
Compounding the swan song of the sky burial is the slow collapse of the Parsi people themselves. With their religious insistence on not intermarrying with people of other faiths, they are now one of the oldest and most childless people on earth.
So there we have it, a tale of ecology and religion intertwined. We can only hope that India's captive breeding programs will help resurrect the vulture, but with their monogamous ways and low birth rate, they are a strange mirror of the Parsi themselves, seemingly doomed.
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