Jonathan Lambert

To me, though, health isn't the first thing that comes to mind when I picture a vulture hunched over the rancid, rotting flesh of a dead cow, tearing strings of lifeless meat from bone until there's nothing left.

Right.

And scavengers' taste for that rotting stuff actually has major benefits for human health, which is maybe best conveyed by a little story.

Excellent.

Okay, so we're going to India.

Way back in the early 1990s, there were some 50 million vultures across India.

But in the mid-90s, they started vanishing.

And over the course of several years, their numbers plummeted by like 95%.

95%.

a painkiller for livestock that just happens to be toxic to vultures.

Its patent ran out in 1993, and usage spiked once cheaper generics came onto the market.

Vultures started eating dead cows to have the drug in their system, which led to a mass die-off.

Well, some researchers estimate that the absence of vultures led to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in the five years after the crash.

Yes, humans.

Yeah, yeah.

It's one of the clearest examples of how scavengers are connected to human health.

But it's far from the only one.

And a new analysis suggests that many other scavengers are declining worldwide.

why their decline could lead to more human disease, and how conservation could help.

The answer lies in the fact that vultures are really, really good at cleaning up dead bodies.