The Plight of the Flying Rats

by Allen Zhang

The jungles of Costa Rica are incredibly bizarre. I look at the small bundle of matted fur, tinged with vermillion, in my hand. The eyes of a bewildered, curious soul stare back at me, wondering how it got into this precarious situation. Turning its head away, it flaps its wings and tries to take off back into the endless abyss of the night. With wings made up of a rubber-like and stretchy material, it is amazing how light these guys are. That is what I say to myself as I look at the Western Red Bat in my hand, holding it still for the scientist to come take measurements. How can anyone find these guys creepy? It seems that the way bats have been portrayed in the media holds a lot of insight for why we’ve come to view them this way.

Back when animal movies were still fresh, tons of movies would use animals that people don’t often see and turn them into something scary. Take Jaws for example, a movie about a killer shark attacking people in a quiet beach town. In reality, most shark attacks happen due to them thinking you are prey, which is actually a rare occasion. That is the same method they’ve used on bats. Bats are nocturnal, and start emerging right as the sun sets, as the bright glow of the moon sounds the alarm in them to come out of hiding. The horror movie Bats’s main focus was on bats that were deadly as a result of government weapon design, who ended up killing people and terrorizing the town. To show when they would attack, the film would use the natural way bats come out at night, which is in swarms. Getting tangled in peoples’ hair, they would strike fear and disgust into the hearts of the viewers. Additionally, when movies aren’t using bats as ways to stoke the feeling of fear, they use them as carriers of diseases. The one movie I saw back as a kid involving bats that stuck with me was Cujo. In the movie, a Saint Bernard gets bitten by a bat, and then slowly starts going mad, trying to attack everything in sight. Having the power to turn the most popular pet into a crazed maniac, this didn’t help the bats’ reputation at all. 

The biggest gimmick that’s used to this day is how bats are the alternate form of vampires. Though bats have been seen as spooky creatures since the late 19th century, being associated with demons and witchcraft, it wasn’t until Bram Stoker wrote Dracula that they became a thing of nightmares and uneasiness for people. The idea started with a real species of bats from South America that drink blood, which led to people naming them Vampire Bats, despite them being harmless, shy creatures. These bats call the rainforests their home, and are most often found on farmlands in those habitats. Stoker’s imagination really made the name into something that drives fear. The imagination of man is an endless entity, one where anything is possible. Hollywood has had a huge impact on bats and turned them into blood hungry, disease ridden, creatures of fear who delight in tormenting people. That is just not true at all. 

Bats in reality are much kinder and caring creatures than the “monsters” they are portrayed as in cinema. Though we hardly see them during the day, bats are actually a very social type of creature, just like how humans are. They rest in huge colonies (be it in tree hollows or cave ceilings), spending lots of time keeping other bats warm and helping to clean them by licking their fur, just like how cats and dogs clean themselves. Same with how humans have friends, it was proven that bats have certain ones they prefer to hang out with more than others. Being able to have some friends doesn’t mean the bats don’t communicate with the whole colony, they have acquaintances in the wild as we have acquaintances at work. It has also been shown that if a bat needs help, random bats will help out. In Florida, a pregnant fruit bat was being helped by an unrelated female, who groomed and hugged her while she gave birth. I have witnessed similar situations in Australia: at a park I saw a huge colony of fruit bats, and when a bat suddenly lost its grip on a branch, a couple others would come down and help the bat back up, either by nudging them or letting the bat crawl onto them to be brought back to the branch. Elders would be flying in the air showing smaller younger bats where to drink water. There were also bats in the tree hugging their young to keep them away from curious older bats, or from wandering off and falling out of the tree. The sight of that was heartwarming, almost similar to seeing a new mom holding their first child. 

Though bats can get rabies, they have a harder time getting that disease compared to other mammals. Unlike in the movies, a bat that is sick won’t go out of its way to infect you. Sick bats spend their time sleeping out exposed in the daytime, with which any person should use common sense, and avoid handling. While the news of how bats caused the COVID-19 pandemic is true, that is only due to someone actively trying to eat one. Bats carry lots of diseases but due to them being the only flying mammals, their bodies have evolved to deal with the stress of flying, which has caused them to develop defenses against the diseases in their body. Humans can’t contract a disease from bats by touching them, we should only be worried about eating and ingesting them.

Can bats process and understand what is going on? Can they see me the way I see them? Full of wonder and curiosity, or does it see me as some brutish giant that has caught it, and is keeping it from its family. It was only later that I learned bats are colorblind but can see thanks to their echolocation, which paints a black/white picture in their brains. Now in recent years bats and other misunderstood animals like spiders, sharks, snakes, and insects have been getting more shows and movies showing the gentler side to them. Half the time I see a bat, it’s at a zoo or in a kid’s movie showing how they aren’t what the old movies made them out to be. 

I think of people, who, like bats, are also constantly misconstrued by the way they look and act. I think of how the media only shares half of what people see or hear, rarely wanting to show everything, only picking the words or visuals that would make us see someone in the worst light possible. These methods of villainization have been around for a long time, and it is only through proper education that we can dispel these myths for good.