Sky burials do still go on in Tibet and adjacent areas. We saw a site in
northern Nepal where this was still practised - it had a flourishing population of
Himalayan Griffons, but the village was so remote that I doubt that much
western medicine got consumed by anyone.

It's also practised by the Parsee communities in India, most famously in
Bombay where a socially incorrect birding friend of mine once got into trouble for
climbing over the wall for a better view of the birds. Those vultures
probably do consume a lot of drug residues, of many kinds, but must have been doing
so for 30 years or more, and their population, I think, didn't crash till the
late nineties along with the rural birds.

Richard Isherwood
Port Townsend WA
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