Vultures are nature’s sanitary workers. Because they feed in groups and eat rapidly—each bird downing more than two pounds of meat a minute—they can rapidly consume whole carcasses. Their guts are acidic enough to destroy the agents of disease, such as cholera and anthrax, so there’s little risk of spreading contamination from an infected carcass. That’s not the case with more leisurely mammalian carrion eaters such as rats or dogs or coyotes. What happens when vultures vanish, people learned the hard way in India and Pakistan more than a decade ago. There, a mass die-off of old-world vultures
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