Eaten by vultures

Talking about thorny issues, here is a real one. People don’t like vultures, but we need them in so many ways and they are often misunderstood. This animal is ugly, with its bald, red head, and seems to have a very bad temper (I know it looks like an English hooligan, but it’s not). Unlike the hooligans, vultures play an important role in keeping ecosystems healthy, and they are completely peaceful and always try to avoid any confrontation. They prevent the spread of disease eating carcasses, but how do they eat rotting meat without getting sick? It’s simple. Vultures avoid eating rotting meat. This might surprise you due to their reputation, but they prefer recently killed carcasses. That’s what vultures call fast food. They happily eat two- or three-day-old carrion, but when it starts to rot, they avoid it. Of course, they also have a great resistance to most diseases, and we must be grateful because with them a lot of health problems disappear. Vultures clean the earth of the decaying carcasses of dead animals. With their excellent sense of smell, they can find a dead animal from a mile or more away. If some beautiful day, with the sun shining, walking in the countryside, you look up and see some vultures flying in circles waiting to feed, you should know that it means that something is dead or dying close to you. Vultures even know very well if someone is a little bit ill.

Not only do they have a healthy function, but they have a religious function as well. In India, Zoroastrians believe that cremation or traditional burial pollutes the earth. Therefore, for the Parsi community, sky burial is the only way. This means to expose a body to the hot sun in the famous “Towers of Silence” to be devoured by vultures. Parsis think that the body goes back to nature in this way, and the circle goes on and on, as vultures will always carry on with their carrion. Now there is a problem in India; the vultures are disappearing from the country’s skies, victims of modern life: pollution, poisoning, urbanization, and so on. As a result, a lot of Parsis are losing their faith. Without these creatures, more and more of them are choosing to be cremated, and a lot of them don’t even want to die. India needs to bring back the vultures, so the government is spending a huge amount of money to build aviaries that can maintain the necessary population of vultures so that people don’t lose the faith.

Anyway, the problems are not always so serious as to endanger a whole religious system. In Florida, vultures are attacking cars to eat the rubber of the windshields, the sun roofs and even the tires. The Miami Police Chief says: “These animals drop down from the sky without warning, very quickly; it only takes a few seconds to do that kind of damage”. His wife’s car is one of the many affected by these surprising attacks. The Police Department has designed, with the help of a well-known biologist, a complex plan to prevent and avoid this dreadful situation. The Chief explains: “To protect your car you have to raise your hands up in the air and move them very fast from left to right and from right to left, at least four or five times, or even better with a thick rope or a whip”. In any case, what an unusual good taste for rubber they have. But it’s easy to explain: this rubber is made with delicious fish oil. Finally, as Tom Waits said in one of his speeches, we all should know that vultures spend a lot of time in the air. They’re so light because they eat so infrequently. They’re mostly feathers. Once they’ve landed, they eat as much as they can, and then they cannot take off without throwing up. This is very sad. Poor little thing, the vulture.

Van Trung