Dosed: Livestock Scavenging Vultures Consume Cocktail of Veterinary Drugs
Griffon, their name conjures images of legend and mythology, but in the skies above Spain and Portugal, thousands of real life griffon vultures survey the earth looking for their next meal. And to a griffon, nothing says “yummy” quite like a fresh pile of pork carcasses – well, maybe sheep.
Don’t knock it. They are one of nature’s best cleaner-uppers. But it turns out that griffon vultures and at least two other vulture species are ingesting something not on their carrion menu, drugs and lots of them.
Vulture numbers have soared in Europe since the 1980s, thanks in part to the common practice of carcass dumping of dead livestock, also called muladares, which provide vultures with a ready and reliable supply of chow. But in cattle, drugs abound. And lunch at a muladar promises a chemical cocktail of veterinary medicine as well as protein.
A new study by Guillermo Blanco with Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid showed that the proportion of vulture nestlings testing positive for antibiotics rose …
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