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laborboleta -> RE: An orphaned, short-tailed fruit bat (12/15/2011 6:49:56 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aylee
May you NEVER have to take a toddler in for a rabies series because of a bat bite or deal with the after-trauma.
Bats do not belong in the house. Any bats in the house deserve death.
I'm really sorry if you had to go through that experience, it must have been awful.
I'm not dismissing the importance of Rabies. I deal with the threat every day of my life. I have personally sent over 30 people for post-exposure Rabies prophylaxis. All of them were exposed to rabid CATS (some of them young kittens). But Rabies is NOT all about bats; far from it.
According to the CDC, in 2010 bats accounted for only 23.2% of rabies cases nationwide. Raccoons and skunks together accounted for 60%, domestic animals (cats, dogs, cattle, etc) for 8%.
In my state of Pennsylvania, the tally of confirmed cases of Rabies from Jan through Nov of this year was as follows:
Raccoons 229
Skunks 51
Domestic cats 44
Foxes 42
Bats 33
Domestic cattle 5
Domestic dogs 3
Domestic goats 2
Other wildlife 11
It has been estimated that the value of the North American bat population to agriculture may be as much as 53 BILLION dollars each year, thanks to their voracious appetite for insects that attack the plants that become our food, fuel, clothing, etc. It has been assessed that a single colony of 150 brown bats in the US Midwest consumes 1.3 million pest insects per year. Extrapolate that out to the entire country and you can get a sense of the service that these animals unwittingly perform for us humans. Before you write off any animal as being unworthy of life, find out more about how much your welfare depends upon theirs.
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