Just today my wife called me to see something, outside neighbors in their yard had a dead bat impaled on a stick, I was like wtf and she said she thought they were going to eat it.
Trinidad wtfisms
You should start a special thread for those. I’d subscribe to it.
I read the thread title exactly the same way…at least that isn’t how this has played out.
I misread your title as Dead wife found in house.
At first I thought maybe it was missing a comma but no, it’s missing an “a”.
When I was a child my grandmother told me a story about another little girl, she said one day the child was playing and a dog ran up and bit her dress. The girl then went to the house to sew the tear the dog had made in her dress. When she was finished she bit the string to then put the needle away. Some time later the child died of rabies. Then I found out that bats are the only mammal that contracts rabies , survives and become carriers. Just looking at pictures of the horrid little things makes me sick to my stomach. So we were living across the street from a young couple who thought it was so fascinating that they had bats in their attic, I thought it was scary enough that I asked my husband to make sure there were no small holes around the outside of our home where bats could get it. I still hate even the idea of a bat!
Back in the 80s a boyfriend’s relative was a landlord, and occasionally we’d help the relative with general upkeep and such. We were “on call” the week the relative/landlord went on vacation, and of course we got a call from a babbling tenant asking us to come over and “catch this great big bug thing!” My boyfriend packed a butterfly net because he was betting it was a bat.
And it was. A baby brown bat that somehow slipped into a back bedroom from the attic. The tenant had closed the bedroom door, but reported that it was flying in circles then hiding within the curtain folds. The details are hazy now, but I remember that my boyfriend and I managed to catch the bat in the net and we let it go in the backyard.
I don’t ever remember anybody saying anything about rabies then – not the tenants, not the relative/landlord, not my boyfriend, nobody. The big thing I always heard about bats was that they go for your hair and they’ll get tangled in it. Of course that’s probably an old wives tale :shrug:
I had a bat in my house just last night!
It wasn’t the first time though. As before the cat caught him. I finally got the cat to drop it, then the dog darted in and picked it up. After that the bat was dead.
Both animals had had their shots, so no worries there. As before, alive or dead, I picked up the bat with a thich oven mitt. It was a very small specimen, so I flushed it as I would have a dead mouse.
you’re off by a factor of between 11 and 20. $1000 total is more like it.
I’m sorry you dislike bats. I love them.
You’re wrong that bats are asymptomatic carriers of the rabies virus. There is a lot of misinformation about rabies. Maybe if you understood it better, you wouldn’t be so afraid. This might help: http://www.cfsph.iastate.edu/Factsheets/pdfs/rabies.pdf
OP, I’m sorry your family has potentially been exposed.
Yup… and that is just for the shots… and there are six members of the family - total bill almost $70,000.
How can anyone love something as potentially dangerous as bats? The bat in the OP’s post didn’t even bite anyone, and they are having to have the rabies vaccine. OOOH I bet they are just loving bats all to pieces…not.
Isn’t it just a little absurd, and possibly a cash cow, to vaccinate anyone who may have been in the vicinity of a bat(confirmed rabies or not)?
I mean unless you’re a blackout drunk or something how could you not notice being bit by a bat?
Seems like a scam to me, or just absurd overkill. It would be like putting everyone on a limited course of antivirals if they ate at a restaurant where a chef was diagnosed with HIV.
EDIT:I could go right now(night) and sit on a bench in a public park under a streetlight and watch HUNDREDS of them flying very close to my head eating bugs. I’ve had several fly into my house and annoyingly not be able to get out(they don’t go for your hair BTW). I mean I should be dead right?
When I was a grad student, a tech in one of the other labs found a dead bat. He was holding it by a wing, waving it around in the air while he marched down the hallway, “Hey, look what I found! It’s a dead bat, come look!” I made him drop it into a biohazard bag, sealed it up and called EHS to come for it. It wasn’t rabid, thank goodness, but the truly scary thing is is that that tech is now in medical school.
I can recall several times in Texas people would be like aww we found this dazed squirrel/baby raccoon/possum/ etc mammal that was just going in circles in our yard and might be sick how cute lets nurse it back to health.
:smack:
Where I went to college, there we bats all over. They’d fly in an open window, we’d chase them around with nets, and let them go. It would never have occurred to me to even consider rabies shots if I weren’t obviously bitten.
Far more people are bitten by dogs every year, often with serious injuries requiring expensive medical treatment, than are exposed to rabies from bats. How could anyone love something as potentially dangerous as a dog?
If you actually handled the bat, then you could very well be exposed to the virus. If you had contact with any of the bat’s bodily fluids, you were exposed to the virus. Since rabies is a fatal disease, and from my understanding, you’re dead meat once symptoms appear, getting the treatment seems like a pretty good idea.
Only one or two people die per year from rabies. Me? I’m one of those people to whom mosquitoes are enormously attracted. Bats are my friend!
Plus, those mosquitoes carry all sorts of stuff that is much more likely to spoil your day.