950 or so Girl Scouts may have to be given preventative shots for rabies, because a counselor at their camp caught wild bats and encouraged them to touch them. There were also bats roosting in the girls' sleeping shelters.
We used to have problems with bats coming indoors down at the old house until we finally cemented up the right hole in the chimney. Becky woke up with one on her pillow one night and we hauled her and the bat straight to the hospital to be checked out. She was unmarked and the emergency room doctor actually asked if he could keep the bat (which Ralph knocked out with a spray can of ether used to start tractors, and put in a jar). The doc wanted to put the bat in his new bat house! Only 1% of the bat population has rabies, but you can't be too careful with that terrible disease. I am terrified of it. There are wild cats around here and they just scare the life out of me because we are in a rabies area.
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Funny you should write this - a few nights ago my damn hunter-cat left a (thankfully already dead and not eaten) bat next to my bed as I slept. I'm not sure how a cat catches bats, given their habits and how they fly, unless it was a sick one. Yikes. I also encounter bats when I work and have to move them to a safe place. I am very careful!
And that is too bad about Susan Butcher, I read an interview with her once, tough lady indeed.
Bats are wonderful, but they have to be enjoyed at a safe distance. How many times do people have to relearn this lesson?
Sheesh!
carina, we have them in the barn and the boss hates them...so of course they single him out to buzz his head in the fall when it is dark when we begin and end our day. He reaches in from the milkhouse door to hit the light switch and then waits a while for them to take themselves off up into the hay mow.
FC I guess other areas don't have the amount of rabies that we have. It has been pretty bad around here the past fifteen or twenty years.
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