A dead cow on the edge of a village in Rajasthan in 1990 would have been stripped to bone within hours. A long-billed vulture can consume four kilograms of flesh in a single feed, and a roosting colony descending on a carcass creates a kind of industrial efficiency that no other animal matches. By 2007, that efficiency had collapsed. The Oriental white-backed vulture, once the most numerous large raptor on earth, had declined by more than 99% across the subcontinent. The cause was diclofenac, a veterinary anti-inflammatory drug that causes fatal kidney failure in vultures that feed on treated livestock. What remained was a carcass and a vacancy.
