The Parsi community in India and Pakistan practice what to us would be considered a very unusual method of disposing of the dead. Rather than burying or cremating the dead, they place the bodies of the recently deceased upon what are called Towers of Silence where they are then eaten by vultures leaving only bones.
Now to us in the west, that sounds abhorrent, but it is in fact an extremely efficient means of disposing of the dead. A pack of vultures will pick a body clean in minutes, and in the Zoroastrian religion, death is considered to be an act of Ahriman, who is the destructive spirit, the embodiment of evil. The contamination of the elements of water, earth, air and fire, which are considered to be pure, the creations of Ormazd, is sacrilege, and so cremation and burial are 
not seen as a clean way to dispose of the dead. Exposure of the dead is additionally considered to be an individual’s final act of charity, providing the birds with what would otherwise be destroyed.
Its a ritual which has been going on for thousands of years, and is very similar to the sky burials practiced by Tibetan Buddhists.
But there has been a dramatic decrease in the population of vultures in India and Pakistan, between 1988 and 1999 years it fell by 95% and in 2008 was estimated to have fallen by 99.9%. This is primarily due to the use of the drug diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory and pain killing drug administered to animals that are ill or in pain so they can work the land for longer.
Unfortunately when these animals die they still have diclofenac in their system, the carcasses are left in the open as traditionally farmers depend upon vultures to eat the dead animals. But when the vultures eat the carcasses, they absorb the drug and eventually die of kidney failure.
Because the carcasses are no longer being tidied up by the vultures, a great deal of hygiene problems in India and Pakistan have arisen. The carcasses of dead animals rot or are eaten by rats and wild dogs, which causes their population to increase and an increase in the prevalence of diseases carried by these scavengers such as rabies. There have been an estimated extra 50,000 deaths due to rabies as a direct result of the decimation of the vulture population.
In 2007 India finally banned the use of veterinary diclofenac, but it is still available for use in humans, and due to Chinese imports of diclofenac for human use are cheaper than the vulture-friendly alternative meloxicam, it is still being used in cattle, somthing which the
Personally I wonder if its actually ethical to pump these drugs into the poor animals who are ill and/or in pain. I understand the need for animals to help with farming and if an animal is out ill then you can’t really do much, but surely there has to be a better solution.
Anyway back to what I was talking about, the decimation of the vulture population in India means that the Parsi communities now struggles to dispose of the dead, whereas in the past only a few hours would pass until the vultures had stripped the body, now it takes significantly longer, up to a year in some cases. A few years ago some towers of silence in Bombay were fitted with solar panels to focus the suns light upon the bodies and aid decomposition. Something that more orthodox Zoroastrians are not particularly happy with, seeing it as a form of cremation and during the monsoon season they don’t work as well. At the same time, the Towers of Silence which were once outside centres of population have now found themselves surrounded by the urban sprawl, leading to complaints about the smell from the decomposing bodies.
So now the Zoroastrians are being forced to abandon a tradition they have practiced for thousands of years and seek other means of disposing of the dead. In the UK where we don’t have the carrion birds, the Zoroastrian community are forced to cremate their dead, despite it corrupting the pure fire. Many Parsis are worried of losing their ethnicity when if they are forced to abandon this tradition. They fear that if the ethnicity is lost, their identity is lost.
And that is such a shame, since before the birth of the Roman Empire the Zoroastrians have been disposing of their dead this way. The Zoroastrians have kept their culture alive despite exile from their homeland for hundreds of years and all it takes to erase this little bit of that ancient culture, is a painkiller.
God Bless
Michael
