We Commend Our Brother to the Gullet

I honestly don't know why I haven't thought of sky burial before.  What a brilliant concept!  Forget expensive funeral costs.  Worried about the amount of valuable land cemeteries are taking up?  Worry no longer.   Concerned about what your cremation might do for your carbon footprint?  Sky burial is the answer.

All you need to conduct a sky burial is a small flat space outdoors.  Oh yes, and vultures.  Vultures are rather important to the whole process.  In fact, vultures are the whole process.  One rather suspects that the term sky burial was invented because it sounds a lot less grisly to say "we gave Grandma a sky burial" than to admit that a beloved relative was torn apart by carrion birds.

Traditionally sky burials have been conducted by Tibetans (where, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the ground is rather stony and difficult to dig graves in) and by Zoroastrians for reasons connected with the polluting nature of corpses and the desire to get rid of them quickly and cleanly.  They dressed it up in religious mumbo jumbo of course but frankly it sounds thoroughly sensible in regions like Iran and India anyway.

Sky burial has gone into a bit of a decline in recent times for various reasons largely connected with governments.  In Tibet they got invaded by the Chinese who crushed all opposition, drove the Dalai Lama into exile and killed or imprisoned those who disagreed with them but nevertheless banned sky burial because they considered it barbaric.  The Chinese reversed this ban in the 1980s but made no comment on whether they no longer considered the practice barbaric or were merely striving for consistency.

In India the Zoroastrian community (or Parsis as I believe they are called for some reason) got on the wrong end of well intentioned government idiocy when the drugs that the Indian government were feeding to their cattle inadvertently wiped out most of the meat eating birds on the subcontinent.  At the time of writing burial arrangements for the entire Parsi community depend on seven morbidly obese buzzards who are actively contemplating vegetarianism.

Still, none of these issues should stop us from introducing sky burial into Australia.  If anyone objects we'll just say we're embracing multiculturalism (there's got to be a few Tibetans or Parsis in the country).  Yes, its a sky burial for me.  The only thing I haven't worked out yet is how to persuade the vultures to eat the headstone.