been marked throughout Southeast Asia, there is some patchiness to the severity of the losses, again with Laos havingsuffered some of the steepest declines. This comparison is instructive because the country retains large tracts of habitat suitable for these species, has a relatively low human population density, and is unlikely to have used environment-contaminating chemicals athigh levels across the ancestral vulture range. Laos did, however, lose most of its open-country wild ungulates during the second half of the twentieth century (through hunting), and it probably experienced significant changes in livestock husbandry (Duckworth et al. 1999). Cambodia, the core area for the relict
Gyps populations of Southeast Asia, differs from the rest of Indochina. A relatively large open-country landscape has until recently remained sparsely settled (because of the Khmer Rouge and other security concerns), wild ungulate populations persist locally, and the villages in and abutting this area still practice extensive free-ranging of domestic bovids during the dry season (Timmins & Ou Ratanak 2001). The remnant Gyps populations in adjacent Laos and Vietnam are unlikely
to be viable under current conditions without this Cambodian vulture population.