Yes, every time we go pee, it's a miracle of metabolism! 😜

I'm glad you guys still make me laugh even when I have to post depressing things! 😅

I don't know very much on Hinduism or India in general honestly, but much like with the US, Europe, or wherever we are, we dont need to look far to find a combination of rich people or wannabe rich people ignoring religion for profit and also poor people forced to compromise beliefs to earn a living.

I do recall recent protests by farmers there due to really damaging farm bills, so I dont think the actual farmers there rank high socially or politically.

It's important to remember the vast majority of people anywhere are decent, they are just getting screwed by that small percentage that doesn't care. I'm sure most of us work for some less than ideal employer, but we don't always need to get judged by that, we're just trying to make a buck too. There's about a million things I'd rather be before Indian dairy farmer comes up, so I'm not going to judge them here. It seems like a hard, hot, nasty job, with little economic benefit to most people involved.

Those pharma people though, and any big ag operation still skirting the rules once the science was out, drag them through the mud all you want though.

I don't want to come off as insensitive, so I'll try to phrase things carefully.

If you have even the slightest spare money per pay period, like $30, and a 401k or 403b is offered to you, you really need to do it.

That money comes out of your check before taxes, so you will be investing more money than what actually comes out of your check. By deduction 6% of a $15/hr full time job, you're putting in $36, but your paycheck will only go down about $30-free money!

Many places will match you some, say half of that first 6%, so now you're saving $54 while only being out $30. You've almost doubled your money in one week!

Come tax time, you've saved $1872, and you've been given a free $936. It doesn't stop there though, because now you only are paying income tax on $29,328 instead of $31,200. If you get a tax rebate now, you will get even more back!

So now you're saving $2808 a year at age 20. Let's put that in one mutual fund, a SP500 index fund. Over the last 10 years, that has returned 12‰, but let's be conservative and call it 10. If you never make a cent more per hour, by age 65, you will have saved $84,000 and your job has chipped in $42,000, over a year's pay! But with that 10% compound interest, you have $2,000,000! You are a multi-millionaire for $30/wk!

If you get a raise or get a better job in the future, this number can be even higher.

Please keep this in mind. Even if you can't do it now, do it ASAP. Here are the same numbers, but starting at 30 instead of 20.

Still amazing, but seeing this difference is why we older on ones tell you not saving earlier was our big regret.

I hope this was helpful and doesn't get taken as a "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" thing.

The ignoring the science part for sure is bad, especially by the manufacturers. But they have probably also saved many human lives by providing more and cheaper food, which was the point of the hybridization in the article.

There seem to be better all around alternatives now, though maybe not as cheap or well known yet.

Hopefully they will continue to replace this old drug and the vultures may someday bounce back.

Science is wonderful, but when we use it for greed, it can become quite terrible as well.

Very interesting!

In return, here is one of my comments from a while back about how birds can generate some of their own water!

So this got me to do a quick read on owl drinking…

Owls don’t typically drink, though they can if they want to or need to due to excessive heat or lack of food.

Their water requirements are typically achieved just through eating. While eating their food whole does capture a decent amount of water, metabolism releases hydrogen atoms that combine with oxygen in the body to produce what is called “metabolic water.”

While mammals usually only generate enough metabolic water to flush out our urea, making our urine, birds are much more efficient at producing metabolic water, and they also don’t urinate, they release the uric acid directly. That is the white part of a bird poo. Both of these factors allow birds to generate their own water supply sufficient to sustain them under normal circumstances.

This article has the best account of why its use was/is so widespread. Here are some select lines from the article:

The introduction of hybrid cows in India coincided with global trends of the chemicalization of agriculture, medicine, and veterinary science.

In the shadow of antibiotics, diclofenac, a common painkiller also for human use, has become a “blockbuster drug” in more-than-human medicine. High-yielding cows undergo relentless cycles of pregnancy by artificial insemination, birth, and lactation. In India, diclofenac was the drug of choice to treat the many pains of high-performance cows, among them mastitis, a painful inflammation of the udder.

Diclofenac is a cheap, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) and thus within the same class of pharmaceuticals as aspirin (ASS) or ibuprofen.

Diclofenac has been sold since 1973 under the brand name Voltaren as an over-the-counter remedy for arthritis pain in humans and domestic animals. With the end of patent protection, it has become one of the most widely used NSAIDs across the world, and its generics are available in India under a variety of brands.

Human and other mammalian bodies metabolize diclofenac and excrete it via the kidneys and the renal system. Healthy mammalian kidneys can deal with the drug reasonably well. To birds, however, diclofenac is a deadly toxin. Birds who ingest diclofenac die of severe renal failure as the effect of kidney necrosis.

Based on emerging evidence of avian kidney toxicity, scientific and political pressure led to the eventual ban of diclofenac for veterinary use in India in 2006. However, many veterinarians consider diclofenac so important for the care of milk cows that they continue to use the drug illegally by misappropriating drugs designated for human use only. Pharmaceutical companies played along by labeling the liquid 30 ml vials, popular among veterinarians injecting the drug, as multi-dosage preparations for human usage

I ate the bones?!

Hehe bones away!

That's crazy they prefer the bones. It seems like that would have much less nutrition.

No competition does seem like a big advantage though.

Thanks for sharing this!

At first it was a lot of what was in this article and the one from Al Jazeera I shared in the other comment, but then it went on to describe the effect it's having on the Parsis and how the loss of the vultures is ending their religion due to them losing their land due to complaints from the vultures not being able to process the bodies.

It also ended with a note on how now there are adults now that have gone their whole lives without ever seeing a vulture. They hear their parents and grandparents talk about them in relation to their religion, but to the kids they are just another mythic beast like a leviathan, as they've never seen one. That's kind of mind blowing to me, and it's sad to think how many other animals our grandchildren might not remember in the future.

Vultures are not typically aggressive. They don't have the speed and strong talons of other raptors. The great majority of their food is already dead when they eat it. If another predator shows up, they will usually get out of there.

Their look is unconventional, but they are largely designed the only way they can be. If we go by the philosophy of beauty being function over form, it becomes easier to appreciate them.

Their heads are typically bald to avoid parasites and pathogens they would get from sticking their heads inside of some gnarly spaces.

Their legs are also bare, and they wash them with their urea (urohydrosis) to keep them sterile as well, because those feet are also going in the same funk.

Vulture stomach acid also comes in between 0-1 pH, making it 100x as strong as ours. All that bacteria and any parasites are going to be nuked.

So they are basically living, regenerating bio hazard suits that can digest anything. They can eat things contaminated with anthrax and botulism without a care in the world.

Bonus fact: There is a Palm Nut Vulture eats nuts, fruit, and grain in addition to meat.

Here's a good one from Al Jazeera.

7 Apr 2015

The massive decline in the vulture population across Mumbai and the entire Maharashtra state began from 1992-93 onwards when the Indian government opened this drug for use in livestock as well. Today, there is not a single vulture in the state, according to Rahmani.

“Diclofenac is lethal to vultures. It does not matter from where they get it, from a dead Parsi or from a dead cow,” Rahmani said.

As corpses take longer, sometimes eight weeks, to decompose fully, the tower of silence continues to be a scene of partially decomposed bodies.

This has pushed some of the Parsi elders to blend the ritual of “sky burials” with modern technology.

“For 800 deaths a year, we need at least 250 vultures. But since there are no vultures around, we’ve installed solar concentrators. I think that’s the only way out now,” Dinshaw Rusi Mehta, a member the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, told Al Jazeera.