By Mark Johnson and Saumya Khandelwal
BIKANER, 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.
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.
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.