About the White-rumped Vulture
The white-rumped vulture was once one of the most abundant large birds of prey on earth — with hundreds of millions of individuals across South Asia as recently as the 1980s. Its catastrophic decline is one of the most dramatic and best-documented wildlife collapses in history. Between 1992 and 2007, the Indian subcontinent's vulture population crashed by 99.9% — a rate of decline exceeding even the dodo. The culprit was diclofenac, a cheap anti-inflammatory veterinary drug widely used on cattle whose carcasses vultures fed upon. Diclofenac causes fatal renal failure in vultures within days of ingestion.
The ecological consequences of this collapse have been severe. Vultures played a critical role as nature's cleanup crew — rapidly consuming carcasses that would otherwise spread anthrax, brucellosis, and rabies. With vultures gone, feral dog populations exploded around carcass dumps, and India experienced a surge in rabies deaths. The Government of India banned diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006, and captive breeding programmes at Buxa (West Bengal) and Pinjore (Haryana) have begun to produce birds for reintroduction. Population recovery is slow — vultures reproduce just once per year — but the numbers are stabilising.