For millennia, Parsi communities have traditionally disposed of their dead in structures called dakhma, or ‘towers of silence’, with the bodies being left to decompose, while vultures and others scavengers eat the flesh on the bones.
But, according to The Guardian, a drastic decline in the vulture population across India, Iran and Pakistan is increasingly preventing this traditional Zoroastrian burial procedure.
The Guardian reports that, unlike many scavengers, vultures are classified as ‘obligate’, meaning that they do not opportunistically switch between predation and scavenging, but rely solely on locating and feeding on animal carcasses.
In recent decades, vultures have been dying in large numbers across the Indian subcontinent, primarily due to inadvertent poisoning with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is extensively administered to cattle in India and Pakistan.
When these cattle die, vultures feed on their carcasses and ingest the drug, which causes painful swelling, inflammation, and ultimately kidney failure and death in vultures. Research in 2007 estimated that about 97% of the three main vulture species in India and the surrounding region had disappeared.
This has had a critical impact on the Parsi community’s burial rights, which have long centred on the disposal of bodies in dakhmas.
The dakhma structures are circular, elevated edifices designed to prevent the soil, and the sacred elements of earth, fire and water, from being contaminated by corpses. Bodies are placed on top of the towers, where they decompose, while vultures and other scavengers eat the flesh on the bones. After being bleached by the sun and wind for up to a year, the bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the centre of the tower. Lime hastens their gradual disintegration, and the remaining material, along with rainwater runoff, filters through coal and sand before it is washed out to sea.
[Photo: by Koorosh Nozad Tehrani for flickr]