We humans vomit on vultures, arrest them as spies in the Middle East, and name killer helicopters in the Ukraine. We project onto them our own mental and geopolitical darkness.
Today is International Vulture Day.
Yesterday was the day of the art of looking for fingerprints at the crime scene to catch the murderer, Dactyloscopy, and tomorrow will not be the international day of anything -let us relax- until Monday they return to the charge with the day of Sexual Health.
But today, like every first Saturday in September, the world celebrates the angel that feeds on dead bodies. The Day of the Beast.
The most brutal thing about the only vulture that I have seen up close, in the Kabul zoo, was the cage where we humans kept it. And the most beastly scavengers I have not found in Afghanistan or Ukraine. I have seen them, also very close, in Paris.
In 2014, taking advantage of the fact that I was in the City of Light to cover the world’s largest arms fair, I went to the Louvre. It was the centenary of the First World War and he wanted to see the Stele of the Vultures, the first war chronicle in history. Carved in stone, it narrates in images a Sumerian war of the year 2450 BC: mass burials of corpses, humans sticking spears into the skulls of other humans, kings smashing the heads of their prisoners with a mallet and vultures nibbling on human remains.
The scavengers, that June, were not just carved in stone. As since the beginning of time, their hearts beat, and in Paris they flew over the stands of the arms fair: one hundred years after June 1914 – when Gabrilo Princip murdered the heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown in Sarajevo – I discovered that the manufacturer (Belgian) of the pistol that fired the first bullet of World War I continues to manufacture pistols today.
Vultures don’t make guns, and we humans project our own darkness onto them. The Ukrainians call the fearsome Russian Ka-52 helicopters Putin’s vultures, and out of sheer geopolitical projection we arrest vultures for soaring freely in the sky.
The Lebanese detained one that flew in with a tracking device attached to its leg. The UN peacekeepers had to intervene: the vulture came from an Israeli nature reserve, and the device was conservationist.
That same year, 2016, another vulture, a Bulgarian, flew over Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to end up arrested in Yemen. Bulgarian diplomacy mobilized to clarify that the espionage was only environmental. A few years earlier, an Israeli vulture was arrested in Saudi Arabia with a transmitter and a bracelet on one leg with the words Tel Aviv University on it. The Saudis insisted that he was a Zionist vulture because the animal was captured near a sheikh’s mansion.
“Person who preys on the misfortune of another”, the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy defines the term vulture as a second meaning. We humans accuse vultures of what we are. Because, unlike humans, who kill for the sake of killing, vultures almost never kill the animals they eat, even though they are the only terrestrial vertebrates that rely almost entirely on carcasses for food.
Unlike humans, who devour the ecological balance of the planet like vultures, vultures without italics are true magicians of that balance. They reduce the number of foul-smelling corpses on the floor, and the strong acid and two bacteria that nest in their stomachs remove toxins and microbes from the decaying meat they eat, preventing the spread of disease.
Humans poison, vomit putrefaction into the food chain, and vultures clean. They clean us up. They do nothing more than remove the abandoned rotten matter to offer it, recycled, to the chain of life.
His stomach acid ends up elevating us. It is the incense of heavenly burials, an ancient funerary practice still widespread in Tibet, Sichuan, Qinghai, Mongolia, Bhutan and parts of India: the body of the person who has died is stripped, their hair is shaved and -before the family, or not – the corpse is dismembered with a knife. And the remains are placed on an elevation for the vultures to eat. Also the bones, previously crushed. It is impossible to find a stronger spiritual expression of the food chain: you do not ascend to heaven until the vultures have ingested all the meat – and bones – of your body.
Vultures fly towards the light and vultures plummet towards the dark side: in 2011, Russell O. Bush denounced in the documentary Vultures of Tibet the irruption of tourism in these excarnation rituals. Two thousand altars have been registered in Tibet alone. The orcs reducing to morbidity a very pure way –for us disturbing– of communing with the cycle of existence.
Everything is brutally true in these burials by elevation, and everything is brutally uncertain in a humanity that is not sure where the Beast ends and Beauty begins, who has one week left to be queen: next Saturday is the international day of Beauty (an initiative of the Russian section of the International Committee for Aesthetics and Cosmetology).
Without lipstick, with their imposing exterior and gastrointestinal beauty, vultures lift us higher than any other living thing. On November 29, 1973, a commercial airliner struck a bird overhead Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Of the animal – swallowed by one of the plane’s turbines – only five complete feathers and fifteen partial feathers from the wings, tail, neck and chest remained. Enough to confirm that it was a spotted vulture.
It is the highest flight ever recorded by a living being: eleven kilometers of altitude. More than Mount Everest.
It was like an angel hit by a Boeing.
