By

M. Sanjayan /

CBS News/ February 19, 2013, 11:11 PM

In Indian carcass fields, pollution's impact takes unusual form

A carcass field a few hours drive outside Jaipur, India shows how one of the ubiquitous items of modern society - the plastic bag - is impacting the country's cattle.

A carcass field a few hours drive outside Jaipur, India shows how one of the ubiquitous items of modern society - the plastic bag - is impacting the country's cattle. / M. Sanjayan

BIKANER, India In India cows are considered holy. They are not eaten, except by the Muslim and Christian minority but even then, in deference to the sentiments of the majority Hindu population, rarely so. Cattle are sighted in both the agricultural heartland and the burgeoning cities pulling the plow, driven before a cart, or simply foraging the streets at will. The milk they provide is a staple of Indian diets (paneer) and their dung is burned for fuel or used to cement up huts.

When cows die they are taken to open fields and left to the scavengers. Sometimes the hides are taken for leather but the meat is left alone. A couple of decades ago India had a huge population of vultures, eight species mostly from the genus Gyps, and they thrived by stripping the cow carcasses left in the fields down to the bone within a few frenzied minutes. Today, because of the huge decline in vulture numbers (over 99 percent for some species like the White-backed vulture) brought about by the widespread use of a veterinary anti-inflammatory drug, Diclofenac, which is deadly to vultures even in a single small dose, the disposal of a carcass is now problematic. Huge dumps have sprouted near urban centers where thousands of dead cows, along with the occasional horse or camel, are brought to rot or be fed upon by feral dogs, crows, and migrant raptors.

I recently visited one of these carcass dumps, a few hours drive from the famed "pink city" of Jaipur, in the desert state of Rajasthan. I estimated perhaps 5,000 visible carcasses spread over about 60 dusty acres. It is hard to tell amidst the jumble of bones, horns, and hide.

The decomposing bodies were an extraordinary sight, the stench tongue-coating and revolting -- yet one thing above all stood out for me: The entire field of carcasses was strewn with plastic -- long strips of it, often brittle, fragile, and invariably white, festooning like macabre party streamers the ribs and horns of dead animals.

M. Sanjayan

In many places streamers of plastic and polyurethane were balled up into a slightly flattened sphere about the size of a plump pillow, one every three or four strides apart. The area was not a garbage dump. It was too far away from the city to conveniently transport rubbish, and I never saw anyone bring a card load of rubbish, so what had brought all this plastic out here?

And then it struck me -- it was the cows! What I was seeing was the stomach content of urban cows. Feeding on refuse and roadside grasses these cows routinely ingest a huge amount of rubbish, including those ubiquitous -- and non-digestible -- plastic bags. The sheer volume was terrifying and it was hard to imagine how these cows could not have suffered malnutrition from the massive amount of plastic they had ingested during their lives

Rajasthan, like other states in India, has banned plastic bags, but the law is openly flouted for the sake of necessity and convenience. And with a lack of investment in infrastructure, a growing and dense population, poor animal husbandry, and low public awareness, plastic bags are a more common a sight in Indian cities than greenery.

Walk through any urban area in India in the morning and you will see shopkeepers and home owners sweeping and sometimes washing the rectangular confines of their street-level businesses. But the refuse is not picked up and put into a bin but rather pushed onto the streets and the edges of the pavements. There is little in the way of public trash cans, little infrastructure devoted to sanitation, irregular garbage pickups, and very little social ostracizing of litterers. It's not that people want to litter, but you can only carry garbage in your hands for so long before you look for a place to get rid of it. Disney has worked out that in their amusement parks, 28 steps is about what it takes for an annoyed American parent to want to ditch litter.

Though I have become somewhat immune to the sight of garbage, seeing the remains of city life transported in the stomach of livestock was, to me, more shocking than the carcasses themselves. It was a reminder of the long impacts we have on our environment that go unnoticed and a sober reminder of the challenges of changing behavior and ingrained practices in societies where buying rather than responsibly disposing, is the driving force.

M. Sanjayan is the lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy and the CBS News science and environmental contributor. You can follow him on twitter at @msanjayan

More reports from M. Sanjayan:

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16 Comments Add a Comment
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erasmus111 says:
All those cows suffering and dying because of their stupidity.
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displeased2 replies:
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I recently saw a clip about a Pacific island, about 2000 miles from other coasts, that's inhabited by birds. The bird graveyards that the clip showed reminded me of these cow's. Some scientists dissected the birds to find their bellies full of plastic trash that drifted along the currents. We live within a wasteful, throw-away society that is clueless, lazy, and simply doesn't care about their littering consequences.
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zibulki says:
Maybe one should invent something to throw the plastics bag into.
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Clafuna replies:
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lmfao hahahaha just killed me over here
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meerasub says:
I'm a journalist who has been to this carcass dump in Bikaner, when I was reporting for a story - http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2011/spring/subramanian-vultures/ - about the vulture decline. The number of plastic bags seen in cows' stomachs is astounding. And the absence of vultures, natural recyclers, disheartening. Read more of my work here: www.meerasub.org
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BBould says:
Check out Africa for even more plastic bags. The natives can't burn them because they cause poison smoke so they discard them everywhere.
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displeased2 replies:
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I agree Bbould. Anywhere there was population, the trash, plastic, and general litter was astounding, from small villages to the large cities. When I traveled along the coast of Ghana, I did not see any shorebirds. You'd expect to see pelicans and seagulls in a tropical region, but all I noticed was plastic and piles of human feces. The only flying critters I saw along the coast were huge fruit bats.
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Park2112 says:
Great article & observations about the impacts of our actions.
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jnostromo says:
This is not news
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displeased2 replies:
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It's news to those who want to be informed.
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brasileira2 says:
Oh my God... This is so sad. Poor animals.
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qyeteye says:
Another out-of-sight / out-of-mind example of humanity contributing to its own demise and that of the natural order of things.

But in the meantime the likes of a Rubio here can raise $100k from bottled water encouraging citizenry to add more plastic to the environment.
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excop1949 replies:
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I DON'T THINK THEY'LL DRINK IT...
BBould replies:
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Much to the chagrin of the left whose hope was that it would ruin his career.
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lillyhorton says:
It amazes me that there are people in the US who still throw trash onto the roads. Thank goodness for volunteers who pick up trash. Even the KKK volunteers to clean a portion of road.
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