Freekin’ ditto. This is one of my worst fears.
No, dammit! It crawled into something (I assume) and after waiting around for half an hour or so I gave up and went to bed. I was certain when I came home tonight I’d walk in the door and it’d fly straight at me, but all’s quiet. I’m sure that’ll change as soon as I hit the post button. 
As for freaking out over rabies…yeah, no. This was an active, chipper, slightly-freaked-out bat, not a wobbly, drunk-acting bat. I’m a lot less paranoid about catching rabies than you are.
My family has practiced catch-and-release for ever and I’m usually good at it; I just didn’t have the right tools last night. Now I’m armed with an old fishing net.
My second-favorite bat story involved a rather stuffy cousin who, during a family gathering, spent several minutes stroking what she thought was a child’s stuffed animal until she looked over the arm of the sofa. BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.
The best thing to do is just to give it a way out that is easy for it to locate. You may have to encourage it towards the exit, but most bats are capable of leaving on their own if they can find the exit.
I’ve never understood the belief of people who think that the proper solution is to kill it. That just seems so unnecessary.
As to rabies shots: the last I heard, they were giving around 5 to 6 of them in the arm. The days of stomach injections are pretty much long gone (although I was a thrilled recipient of those: 21 injections over a two-week period when I was ten years old. After about half a dozen of them, the abdominal tissue toughened up, so that the rest of the injections just sat like marbles under my skin. It felt like a pearl necklace around my navel–but not in a fun Las Vegas way–and took them months of achey bruising to finally dissapate completely).
Be gently, bats are cool and important…but don’t take chances on the rabies thing. So far as I know, it’s still uniformly fatal.
Find a synonym for the second use of “exit”.
Dissipate.
Be gentle
I’m going to bed, now. :rolleyes:
Since they’re carriers, they don’t exhibit the same symptoms as a creature that has contracted rabies (i.e., wobbly). That said, the percentage of rabid bats is very low. I know this intellectually, but the phobia lingers, nonetheless.
That christmas story…if that happened to me, it would be my undoing. Seriously.
A coworker of mine had a bat get into his house, and it actually dive-bombed him and his wife. Though they weren’t knowingly bit, the bat was in the house all night at one point when they were sleeping - so they were recommended to get the rabies shots as a proactive measure.
This is also the guy who was struck by lightning, his heart briefly stopped that evening, and for 6 months afterwards was electrified - he would get a shock when touching metal, and shock others when shaking hands. Pretty cool, if you ask me - but probably pretty annoying after a while. 
He’s also the one whose basement was flooded this past winter because a local Target going in across the street drastically changed the drainage of the local area. After replacing the hot water heater and furnace, it flooded again this spring.
Yeah, he’s what you call a good luck sumbitch.
They do tell you to get the shots if you have been sleeping in a room with a bat, since people have in fact gotten rabies and been unaware that they were bitten. That’s what happened to the one, one, ONE confirmed case of somebody surviving active rabies - she was sleeping in a room that had a bat in it and did not know she had been bitten.
That aside, I got no problem with bats as long as I’m awake and that Christmas story is awesome.
How did a bat get in your house?
It’s an old building - I see a bat in my hall or the stairway every couple of months and, occasionally, a murdered one outside. :mad:
Which is another reason I’m not rushing off to get a rabies shot; I’d have to get one every three months if they freaked me out, I think.
The only survivor of active rabies without benefit of a vaccine, Jeanna Giese, was actually awake when she was bitten. She carried a sick bat out of her church building.
Here’s more about her, and there’s also information about the treatment.