I saw the train coming; I was there

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“We need help! We don’t need more research.”

It was the end of a long, hot day in Rajasthan in 2009. I finished my field surveys in Bhagtasni Village, just southeast of Jodhpur, Rajasthan’s third largest city. I could tell that the men I was interviewing were impatient. By the third week of my time in the field, word had spread of the “Ghora Kala” (the white outsider who is Black) and what I was doing. The honeymoon was over, and folks wanted to know what I had to offer besides the novelty of my physical appearance and stories of America.

“Is there anything else you’d like me to know about your village?”

“Yes. We need help! We need water, we need food, we need medicine. We don’t need more research!”

At that moment, I saw the deeper meaning of my name. White outsiders had been coming to rural Rajasthan to study the people and help solve their problems, but we outsiders were just there to extract information and build our own careers. If the people were helped, great, but the real focus was finishing my dissertation and improving my life.

I’ve always felt guilty about not giving as much as I took. I still have not made those relationships right. I received and am still receiving so much more than I gave, though I tried to provide more than most.

The people knew what they needed. The people knew where to go to get what they needed. They needed someone(s) to change the minds of the people with power over them.

In the face of injustice and oppression, our non-human relatives are the same.

Wildlife conservation is simple.

India was home to the largest collective population of scavenging raptors in the world. Some estimate that India’s vulture population was, at one point in time, 50 million birds. That’s more vultures than humans in the top 50 most populous cities in the U.S.!

However, in the mid-1990s, that began to change, and by the end of the 20th century, vulture populations had declined by upwards of 90%.

The culprit was a commonly prescribed drug called Diclofenac that had recently been developed into a veterinary version for livestock. Diclofenac is essentially aspirin, but through a quirk of evolutionary biochemistry, Indian vultures can't break down in their bodies. The result, when vultures consume livestock recently inoculated with diclofenac, is visceral gout and, if the dose is high enough, death.

Vultures feeding on livestock that had been treated with diclofenac — and they were because it was a cheap drug that people could afford, sometimes the only drug they could afford — were essentially being indirectly and unintentionally poisoned.

The collapse of the Indian vulture population is similar to that of the California condor population. In fact, Indian vulture conservationists developed strong direct ties with condor conservationists in the early 2000s to learn from the success of the condor conservation program. How do I know? I am a part of both words.

My dissertation research on the impact of the Bishnoi people on wildlife conservation — including vultures — led me to my career studying condors. I know and work with Indian vulture folks and condor folks. I’ve written papers on both. I’ve handled both species. And in both cases, I’ve come to understand that the way to save both couldn’t be simpler.

The human cultures that dominate the landscape have to change.

That’s it. Simple. But, of course, not at all easy.

Now that science has arrived, I guess we can start

You don’t need to have a Ph.D. to know that this place is not healthy for humans.

It’s not, yet there is an entire social structure in India that guarantees a subset of the population will always be in this space because that is how it was decided people like them earn their livelihood.

Interestingly, darker-skinned folks are overrepresented in this population.

USian culture is undoubtedly far from the moral high ground, though, so don’t start scoffing, dear reader. The point I’m making here is that you can’t understand big societal problems without talking to the people most subject to the ills of any human culture.

In my research on human impacts on vultures, the economically oppressed people in rural areas were the most knowledgeable about the trends of vulture populations. In my work on condors, I’ve found the most satisfying and productive conversations on wildlife conservation to be with Indigenous folks.

So when this paper was published this past June in the American Economic Review (thanks to those who sent me this), I was not surprised by the authors’ conclusions.

The authors estimate that the decline of vultures resulted in nearly half a million deaths and almost $70B per year in damages from 2000 to 2005. A genuinely staggering socio-ecological disaster…that those on the ground already understood

Vultures are incredibly efficient consumers of animal flesh. A small group of large vultures can strip a cow carcass to the bones in under an hour. Imagine your neighborhood trash pick-up consisting of garbage men coming by and simply eating all your refuse. How much space on our landscape and less contamination would we have to contend with if such beings existed?

However, those large animal bodies are left to rot and decompose much more slowly without vultures. That slow decomposition is a breeding ground for harmful pathogens that proliferate in the soil, the water, and even other species.

The majority of rabies deaths in the world occur in India because of the explosion of feral dog populations due to the sudden lack of competition for livestock carcasses in the early 2000s. Vultures were being poisoned into extinction, so now there was so much more food for dogs. But you knew that already, right?

The people I talked to during my dissertation already understood this. They didn’t necessarily know that vultures were dying from visceral gout, but they did know vultures had declined dramatically. They didn’t necessarily know that vulture declines led to an increase in dog populations and rabies in dog populations. Still, they did know that there were a lot more dogs and that their relative, when attacked, had to go to the doctor for painful treatment.

They knew that more people had gotten sick this year than in years past and that the folks in the untouchable castes who lived in their communities were suffering the most.

In my most cynical mind, when reading this paper, I think, “Oh! Thank goodness we finally have the numbers that show just how bad this global capitalism-induced catastrophe actually was. What would we have done without this research?!”

But the truth is, the potential to do better has increased because this paper was published.

Hate the game, not the player

The scientific method is also incredibly powerful for understanding our world. I just wish more human societies didn’t treat Eurocentric scientific inquiry as the only authority worth paying attention to when faced with a problem.

Science was necessary to pinpoint the source of vulture mortality. However, despite the ban on the production of diclofenac in India, it is still the most widely used drug, both in humans and livestock, in the country.

Had socially oppressed classes been allowed at the decision-making table once diclofenac was identified as the primary culprit, perhaps more resources could have been allocated to find economic solutions to the problem.

Meloxicam was one such alternative, a similar drug that didn’t cause visceral gout in vultures but cost three times as much as diclofenac. This drug might have been subsidized so that rural folks could afford it, perhaps for cheaper than $70B a year and without half a million human deaths.

I guess we’ll never know.

The biggest lesson for me in this long saga is that, almost without fail is that the solutions to the most significant problems we humans face on this planet are not unknown; they’re simply incompatible with how we’ve constructed our cultures to be in relationship with our non-human relatives and environment.

The way to save California condors begins with banning the use of lead in firearms — which California did in 2019 — halting industrial chemical pollution and drastically reducing the livestock footprint on the continent.

Ban diclofenac AND empower rural and oppressed populations in India, and you’re on your way to restoring vulture populations that help keep the subcontinent’s ecology sustainable.

Yes, both solutions are not easy and would require a fundamental restructuring of both societies, but isn’t that what we would expect given how much work (violence) it took to construct these massive societies in the first place?

There are many different ways of knowing. Science is an incredibly powerful tool of knowing, but it’s not the only one and often isn’t the best one we can deploy.

Humans are good at recognizing suffering, both in our and other species.

We don’t need half-decade-long studies to confirm suffering, but we do need them to move the levers of power to attempt to end said suffering, and that’s a problem.

I’m glad this study exists and that other people can wrap their minds around the devastation caused by the loss of vultures in India.

Now that we know better, will we do better?

Give me five years, and I’ll have a scientific answer.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan