[Buddha-l] Buddhist stupa to be moved from NM Petroglyph Park

[Jo]

[.............]
Once I get talking about death and funerals, I just can´t seem to stop.
It´s by far my favorite topic. A couple of days ago I heard a fascinating radio news report about the critical shortage of buzzards in India. This has caused a crisis in the Parsi community. For centuries they have put their dead out in towers of silence to be eaten by buzzards, but the heavy use of pesticides to keep the insect population down has rendered buzzards infertile, and there is fear that buzzards may go entirely extinct in India within a few more years. And that raises the troubling social question, ¨What on earth does one do with a dead Parsi?¨

--
Richard Hayes

_______________________________________________

The Indian vulture shortage has been around for a few years already--the pesticide killing them comes from cow carcasses that vultures are allowed to consume (even if the gao is sacred in India, they don't insist on cremating them). This poison was being used ironically to protect the health of cattle--Indra only knows if it also killed some people. Anyway it killed lots of vultures, hence the shortage experienced by the Parsi funeral practices. The Indian government banned the use of this poison in cattle rearing, but laws in India ..............? 
Interestingly, allowing the vultures to eat up the hacked remains of dead humans, aka sky burial, was also practiced by Tibetans. I don't know if the Parsis prepared their corpses the same way as the Tibetans did. See this article about the Parsis' vulture shortage:
http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060908/news_lz1n8read.html 

Joanna