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Vultures are more worthful than you may call up , or at least they were .

In the eighties , more than 40 million predator existed throughout India , where they ate about 12 million gobs ( 11 million metrical lashings ) of rotting chassis each year , concord to the environmental writer Tony Juniper . Today , however , vulture populations have been reduced to only a few tens of thousands , and three of the most important metal money are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature ( IUCN ) .

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The photo of a giant vulture in Pakistan that died after eating the drug-tainted carcass of livestock.

They have declined largely because rancher started giving their cows an anti - rabble-rousing drug calleddiclofenacthat is toxic to the birds , which feed utter cattle , Juniper writes . Without marauder to eat this festering quagmire , wild dog have taken their station and population have din . The dogs have , in turn , spread rabies by biting humans , kill an estimate 50,000 the great unwashed in the last couple X , according to Juniper .

" Deaths of course have much more than financial event , but they do have fiscal consequences , not least for the mob of the dead " and the Indian economic system , writes Julian Champkin at Signifance , the bimestrial magazine and site of the Royal Statistical Society . This price is an eye - water $ 34 billion , fit in to Juniper .

Once described as the globe ’s most plentiful raptor , the critically endangered white - rumped vulture ( Gyps bengalensis ) has decline by more than 99.9 percent in just 15 old age , the IUCN reports .

A photograph of the head of a T. rex skeleton against a black backdrop.

Vultures , dislike as they may be for their multi-color appearance and tie-up with death , once offer billions of dollar worth of service for humans . The same is on-key for other animals , and other aspects of the ecosystem ( like pelting forest ) , writes Juniper in his young record " What Has Nature Ever Done For Us ? How Money Really Does Grow on tree diagram " ( Profile Books , 2013 ) . He argues that ecosystems have created all of the thing that human being value , including humankind themselves and our markets ; therefore , economic values are nonmeaningful if they do n’t consider environmental impact .

" The truth is that the economy is a wholly have subsidiary company of ecology , not the other way around , " he said .

There are several captive breeding plan to reintroduce predator to the wild , according to the IUCN .

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