When someone says "bats" & an hysteric cries "rabies!" it strikes me as
rather tragic and symptomatic of the envirophobia that causes too many
humans to live amidst concrete and steel herbiciding every plant and
poisoning every animal, while all wilderness areas are under attack by
human perfidy, greed, ignorance, fear...

Take all the rabies deaths in humans that tested out as bat rabies since
1951 to 2008, it's 51 cases total, so less than one a year. Four of these,
or approximately 8%, were contracted from organ transplants, so worry
about that if you get a new cornea or a lung. Three cases were spelunkers
who regularly entered caves heavily populated by bats.

So statistically you're 25% more likely to die of bat rabies from
transplantation surgery than if you regularly explore caves filled with
bats.

Or, every time you get in your car you are way over 40,000 times more
likely to die, than you are to get rabies of any kind.

If that doesn't convey the abject absurdity of this fear, then we're not
dealing with rational humans at all. A healthy-acting wild animal is not
liable to be rabid, and anyone who tries to catch a sickly wild animal is
doing the right thing by cleaning up the human gene pool of just such
idiots as themselves.

The species in the United States most apt to be rabid is the racoon. Of
proven incidents of animal rabies each year, 50% are racooons, 8% to 10%
are domestic animals. Even though far more people encounter rabid racoons
than rabid bats, the average annual number of raccoon rabies in humans for
the last 50 years is zero.

Others with common sense WILL have bat boxes in their garden, and will NOT
be scared shitless when they realize those boxes on poles or in trees in
many public parks are for bats, which are a benificial part of the
environment & should in every way be encouraged.

-paghat the ratgirl
--
visit my temperate gardening website:
http://www.paghat.com
visit my film reviews website:
http://www.weirdwildrealm.com