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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
West Africa’s plan to save its vultures struggles to take flight
Filed 22h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk
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Virtutes Instrumenti
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: gdsteam · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Surveys across Togo and Benin document steep declines in hooded, palm-nut, and white-backed vultures, with the last white-backed vulture in Togo seen in 2019 and only a few hundred hooded vultures counted nationwide. Market surveys in Benin found vulture parts still for sale despite falling wild populations, and researchers say demand hasn't dropped even as the birds available to meet it have.
The West African Vulture Conservation Action Plan, launched two years ago, aims to cut poisoning by 2029 and restore populations to sustainable levels by 2040, but researchers describe minimal on-the-ground translation of those goals into national programs, particularly in Benin. Meanwhile the crisis is spreading: yellow-billed kites are being killed to substitute for vultures in fetish markets, and vulture poisoning has been documented in Chad to supply demand in Nigeria and Benin.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A plan that promises recovery by 2040 sounds responsible right up until you notice the vultures are being sold at the market today, not in fifteen years. Chad now has poisoning problems traceable straight back to demand in neighbor countries, which means the crisis is being outsourced the way a factory ships its smoke over the next town's line. Two hundred and some traditional healers signing on to try herbal substitutes is real progress, but it is a garden hose against a house fire until somebody funds the enforcement part nobody wants to pay for.
