Source: International Herald Tribune
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/opinion/11iht-edparsi.1.5666798.html?searchResultPosition=1
MUMBAI: As an Indian Parsi Zoroastrian, I'm proud to belong to a tiny minority widely admired for its material success and its philanthropy.
But I feel a closing sense of siege. The vicissitudes of modern life are threatening our group's ethnic identity and ancient ways.
The vulture, our main accomplice in death for nearly 4,000 years, excites a largely morbid curiosity about our sect. Parsis are descended from Zoroastrians who, 1,200 years ago, fled religious persecution in Persia after the Muslim conquest and emigrated to the Indian subcontinent. Zoroastrianism reveres all elements, especially fire, so we don't cremate our dead, or pollute the earth with burial.
We offer our dead to vultures, laying the bodies in so-called Towers of Silence - high-walled, slatted pits shrouded in mystique and sylvan acres that are known as Doongerwadi, or hill groves, which the Parsis set up on the outskirts of their Indian settlements. The practice may seem macabre, especially in as Westernized a community as ours, but it is swift and eco-friendly.
Now these ancient funeral rites are doomed because the population of the South Asian vulture has plummeted by 97 percent in 15 years. The killer is Diclofenac, a livestock drug developed in the early 1990s. Even minute traces in cattle carcasses causes kidney failure in the giant scavenging birds. The Indian government banned Diclofenac in May 2006, but the move came too late for the vultures - and for the Parsis.