VULTURES DINE AT TURKISH CARRION RESTAURANT
By Sarah Dowdey

Discovery News
-at-turkish-carrion-restaurant.html
Feb 23 2010

Ask someone what his or her favorite animal is and most probably
won’t answer "vulture." That doesn’t mean the threatened scavenging
birds don’t have their defenders, though. According to NatGeo News
Watch and Cagan Å~^ekercioglu, senior research biologist at Stanford
University, vultures are so threatened by the toxins found in their
carrion’s flesh, they sometimes need special preserves stocked with
clean meat to thrive. Call it the vulture’s version of the regional,
organic, neighborhood restaurant.

A new such restaurant just opened in Igdır, Turkey, near the Armenian
border in eastern Anatolia. The region is especially important to
four types of vultures: Egyptian, griffon, bearded and black. Turkish
officials and conservationists like Å~^ekercioglu hope that a fresh
selection of untainted carrion will protect these species from the
toxic hazards that have decimated populations in other parts of the
world. California condors were so threatened by the lead shot lacing
their scavenged meals, the bullets are now banned within their range.

In northern and central India, the livestock drug diclofenac, present
in the cow carcasses vultures feed upon, nearly drove the birds to
extinction. Such veterinary medicines can damage vultures’ kidneys.

For anyone skeptical of why vultures should be preserved in the first
place, the situation in India provides a compelling case. Vulture
deaths there started a nasty cycle: The scavengers became the scavenged
as feral dogs started eating the poisoned birds. Booming packs of
feral dogs meant an increased threat of rabies in humans.

It’s easy enough to see why Turkey would wish to avoid such a
situation.

The big question though is where does all this clean meat come from?

Å~^ekercioglu says it will be a mix of "road kill, butcher shop
remains, the carcasses of farm animals that have died naturally
[…] or animals like wild boars that have been killed by local
hunters." (Don’t worry, no lead poisoning here; the hunters use
copper bullets for their boar hunting.) And if vulture fine dining
sounds like something you’d like to make your own reservation for,
the new restaurant will also feature hides for tourists, wildlife
photographers and residents to watch from. Bon appetit!

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress