Bats Don’t Deserve Their Bad Rap
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - PETA
October 30, 2006
By Paula Moore
If you’re decking the halls for Halloween—with creepy ghosts and bubbling cauldrons—here’s a suggestion: This year, skip the swooping bats.
Although bats and Halloween seem to go together like candy bags and x-ray machines, you actually have more to fear from a stranger’s sweets than you do from a bat. Unlike Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, bats don’t “vant to drink your blood.” They don’t have rabies. They won’t get tangled in your hair. And they’re not blind.
In fact, we humans seem to be the ones who are blind, or at least a little dumb. How else to explain that we have driven many bats to the brink of extinction—nearly 40 percent of American bat species are endangered—even though these gentle, intelligent animals are some of our most essential allies?
Most of the world’s bats eat bugs. A lot of bugs. A single little brown bat, one of the species found in North America, can consume 1,200 insects in one hour. The 20 million Mexican free-tail bats who live in the Bracken Cave in Texas—the world’s largest bat colony—eat 200 tons of insects every night. Some farmers are starting to get the picture, and are establishing bat colonies to keep their crops bug-free, instead of relying on toxic pesticides. A colony of just 150 big brown bats will gobble up 33 million or more rootworms every summer.
Fruit-eating bats, who have keen senses of sight and smell, help pollinate and disperse the seeds of bananas, dates, figs, mangoes, cashews, and other plants. Bats even play a part in tequila production, by pollinating the agave plants from which this drink is made.
But what about the vampires?” you may be thinking; some bats drink blood. Of the nearly 1,000 species of bats, only three are vampires—and they’re not nearly as nasty as Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker. Adult vampire bats adopt orphaned babies, and they regurgitate their food to share with hungry roost-mates.
And if you’re worried about rabies, well, you’re more likely to die from bee stings than from contact with a rabid bat. Less than one-half of one percent of bats contract rabies, and those who do aren’t likely to bite, unless you pick them up (and why would you be trying to pick up a bat in the first place?).
In her wonderful short story “My Life as a Bat,” Margaret Atwood says bats pray for “deliverance from evil … which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.” Ironic, isn’t it? While we’re busy vilifying animals we don’t understand (if not bats, then snakes, or sharks, or … the list is nearly endless), in the animals’ eyes, it’s we who are the monsters. But we can change this. Let’s start by finding the courage to peacefully co-exist with—instead of blindly exterminating—animals we wrongly believe are “scary” or “not useful.” In time, we might just come to see what good neighbors these animals really are.
Paula Moore is senior writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.HelpingAnimals.com.
If you’re decking the halls for Halloween—with creepy ghosts and bubbling cauldrons—here’s a suggestion: This year, skip the swooping bats.
Although bats and Halloween seem to go together like candy bags and x-ray machines, you actually have more to fear from a stranger’s sweets than you do from a bat. Unlike Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, bats don’t “vant to drink your blood.” They don’t have rabies. They won’t get tangled in your hair. And they’re not blind.
In fact, we humans seem to be the ones who are blind, or at least a little dumb. How else to explain that we have driven many bats to the brink of extinction—nearly 40 percent of American bat species are endangered—even though these gentle, intelligent animals are some of our most essential allies?
Most of the world’s bats eat bugs. A lot of bugs. A single little brown bat, one of the species found in North America, can consume 1,200 insects in one hour. The 20 million Mexican free-tail bats who live in the Bracken Cave in Texas—the world’s largest bat colony—eat 200 tons of insects every night. Some farmers are starting to get the picture, and are establishing bat colonies to keep their crops bug-free, instead of relying on toxic pesticides. A colony of just 150 big brown bats will gobble up 33 million or more rootworms every summer.
Fruit-eating bats, who have keen senses of sight and smell, help pollinate and disperse the seeds of bananas, dates, figs, mangoes, cashews, and other plants. Bats even play a part in tequila production, by pollinating the agave plants from which this drink is made.
But what about the vampires?” you may be thinking; some bats drink blood. Of the nearly 1,000 species of bats, only three are vampires—and they’re not nearly as nasty as Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker. Adult vampire bats adopt orphaned babies, and they regurgitate their food to share with hungry roost-mates.
And if you’re worried about rabies, well, you’re more likely to die from bee stings than from contact with a rabid bat. Less than one-half of one percent of bats contract rabies, and those who do aren’t likely to bite, unless you pick them up (and why would you be trying to pick up a bat in the first place?).
In her wonderful short story “My Life as a Bat,” Margaret Atwood says bats pray for “deliverance from evil … which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.” Ironic, isn’t it? While we’re busy vilifying animals we don’t understand (if not bats, then snakes, or sharks, or … the list is nearly endless), in the animals’ eyes, it’s we who are the monsters. But we can change this. Let’s start by finding the courage to peacefully co-exist with—instead of blindly exterminating—animals we wrongly believe are “scary” or “not useful.” In time, we might just come to see what good neighbors these animals really are.
Paula Moore is senior writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.HelpingAnimals.com.
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