Vultures eat anthrax, botulism, rabies, and cholera for breakfast. Their stomach acid is among the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, with a pH around 1, low enough to dissolve the bones, hide, and pathogens of dead animals that would kill almost anything else. A vulture eating a diseased carcass isn't a vector for disease, it's a terminus. The disease chain ends in the vulture's gut, and that's pretty hardcore. When vulture populations crashed in India in the 1990s, rotting livestock carcasses sat where vultures used to clean them. Feral dogs and rats took over the cleanup, both of which actually do spread rabies. Researchers later linked the vulture collapse to roughly 500,000 deaths in India over the following decade. The same collapse is now underway in sub-Saharan Africa. Six of eleven African vulture species are threatened with extinction, primarily from poisoned poaching baits. The animals nobody finds cute are doing more public health work than most of the species we actively protect.
