Cape vultures and Africa's other vulture species are rapidly declining from poisoning, electrocution, and trade in body parts, with devastating consequences for ecosystem health from the loss of nature's sanitation workers.
Poisoning events cause mass vulture death events that can kill hundreds of birds at a single carcass within hours. Individual vultures experience the acute suffering of pesticide poisoning or lead toxicosis before death. The scale of mortality from a single poisoned carcass can eliminate years of reproductive success from an entire regional population. Trade in vulture body parts creates economic incentive for deliberate killing that compounds accidental poisoning mortality. The welfare of individual vultures and the ecological service they provide - preventing disease spread through rapid carcass consumption - are inseparably linked.