Fact and fiction
Fiction
Myth: All bats drink blood
Myth: Most bats carry rabies, and are dangerous to humans.
Myth: Bats become intangled in your hair when they fly around.
Fact
*Bats are very intellegent, and like dolphins are easily trained.
*Bats are very clean animals, and groom themselves, like cats (and rats!), after meals.
*Bats live up to 15-20 years (a few even make it to 30!)
*Bat guano is a great fertiliser and can do wonders for your garden.
*Bats are the main control on night insects...one colony on Bredasdorp consumes 100 tonnes of insects each year!
(special thanks to DBIG for this page...I could not have done it without their bat worker's maual!)
Myth: Bats are blind.
All bats have eyes and can see very well.
Only vampire bats in South America drink blood, and they prefer the blood of cattle and birds to that of humans.
Hardly any bats have rabies, and there has only ever been one case of rabies passed on by bats in all South African history.
Thanks to bats finly tuned echolocation, they can detect obstacles as tiny as a single human hair, and so it is extremely unlikley that a bat would become stuck in your hair.
*Bats are warm blooded mammals, and are very social animmals. They suckle their young for the year of life.