Stephanie Morren recently travelled to India to work at a captive breeding centre set up to help re-establish Asian vultures, and wrote this blog about her experiences.
They're pretty ugly, all hairless necks and blood-covered bills, and they eat dead animals. But the truth is better than that.
Vultures are vital.
In South Asia, they're nature's cleaners and tidiers – binmen, if you like. They clean up what would otherwise be left to rot and harbour dangerous diseases.
It's pretty amazing: a single vulture can consume 120 kg of flesh in a year, and a vulture flock can clean up a carcass in several hours.
Imagine what would happen if we didn't get a rubbish collection for a few weeks. The streets would smell awful, and be strewn with rubbish.
In the same way, if we didn't have vultures, vast areas of South Asia would fill up with dead animal carcasses.
But all is not rosy in vulture land. In the last 10–15 years, Asian vultures have declined enormously, so much so that 99.9% of white-backed and 97% of long-billed and slender-billed vultures are now extinct. This amounts to a massive 40 million birds.
In 2003, we found out the reason for these declines. The anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac was being widely administered to cattle by vets. When these animals died, the vultures ate the flesh, which still contained traces of the drug, leading to death in just a few days.
In India, for example, cows hold a very important cultural status. It's a country where 70% of the population is Hindu, and cows are revered as sacred. There is therefore a strong move to keep cows alive, and to use veterinary drugs such as diclofenac.
The slaughter of cows is completely banned in eleven states, and so cows are left to die naturally, with their bodies left outside villages, which were then stripped by vultures. Vultures strip and clean a carcass and ensure that bacteria and disease are prevented from contaminating soil and water.
But in parts of South Asia, there are so few vultures that increasing numbers of feral dogs are feeding on the dead cattle, often attacking villagers, and spreading diseases such as anthrax and deadly rabies.
For a long time, diclofenac was widely used to treat sick cattle, with no knowledge that it was harmful to vultures. But, in 2006, together with our partners, we successfully lobbied to get diclofenac banned for veterinary use.
However, three vulture species have been left hanging terrifyingly close to extinction.
Re-establish vulture numbers
Alongside our partners SAVE (Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction) and BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society), we created a programme to re-establish vulture numbers.
We've set up three centres where vultures are safely bred in captivity before being released into the wild. To date, we've successfully bred a total of 200 oriental white-backed, long-billed and slender-billed Gyps vultures, all of which will be released back into the wild.
Vultures only start to breed when they're five years old, and produce just one chick a year, so it will take a considerable amount of time to re-establish Asia's vulture populations, which is why the vulture breeding centres are so important.
But a vulture breeding centre costs £360,000 a year to run, and can only run with the help of donations.
There's another problem too, in that there's a risk that releasing captive-bred birds into areas where there are still traces of diclofenac might create the same problem. Therefore, we're working to create 100 square kilometre (38 square mile) vulture safe zones, where we know that all contamination has been removed.
It's a crisis, and we need to act now.