Fighting extinction: Changa Manga's Vulture Centre
The WWF centre in Changa Manga currently hosts as many as 19 vultures. Photo: Fatima Arif
(Dunya News) - It wasn’t long ago when vultures used to consume the flesh of dead animals within minutes – saving the environs by preventing numerous diseases from spreading.
As a consequence of the excessive use of Diclofenac on farm animals, vultures in Punjab are on the edge of extinction as the residue of medicine still present in the dead bodies of animals also causes the vulture that eats it, to die.
“The absence of these natural scavengers in the environment has resulted in an increased amount of stray dogs. The longer dead animals will be present in the open atmosphere, the more diseases will spread,” says Wardah Javaid, co-coordinator of the WWF-Pakistan’s Vulture Center located in Changa Manga. The centre is the only manmade source of survival for vultures that are on the verge of extinction.
Following the ban of the deadly medicine, now efforts are being made across Punjab to prevent the extinction of this environment-friendly bird. Owing to these efforts, the number of vultures has increased to 19 in the WWF-Pakistan’s Vulture Centre, and for this figure to improve more efforts are required to allow their survival to continue.
Abdul Ghaffar, the supervisor of Vulture Centre told Dunya News that vultures lay only two eggs annually and that too, sometimes don’t hatch. He further said that the bird is really important for the environment and so we should protect it.
These efforts have proved fruitful not just for the cultures but also, in the end, for humanity at large.
For more on this, watch a report by Dunya News below.
