T&T holds the em­bar­rass­ing dis­tinc­tion of be­ing one of the few coun­tries in the world which still lists all our bats as ver­min. Con­trast this with the US and Cana­da, where they are cel­e­brat­ing Bat Week from Oc­to­ber 25 to 31.

Many peo­ple al­so have an ir­ra­tional fear of bats, main­ly due to mis­in­for­ma­tion. Bats are not ver­min, they are not to be feared, and the ben­e­fits of bats far out­weigh the con­flicts we have with them.

I like to think of bats as the night shift. All of the ser­vices we get from birds dur­ing the day, we get these from bats at night. One study sug­gests that bats eat so many in­sect pests in the US they are worth $3 bil­lion per year to the agri­cul­ture in­dus­try.

Bats pol­li­nate many fruit trees we en­joy, and, since they of­ten car­ry fruit away from the par­ent tree, are in­stru­men­tal in seed dis­per­sal. Bats can al­so be im­por­tant con­trib­u­tors to the tourist econ­o­my, as ex­em­pli­fied in Austin, Texas, and al­so by the Tamana Caves in Cen­tral Trinidad.

If bats are so great, then why are many Trin­bag­o­ni­ans so ar­cha­ic in our think­ing? There are two main species in Trinidad which give all bats a bad name. These are the vam­pire bats. At one stage, there was a ra­bies out­break in Trinidad spread by vam­pire bats. We are part­ly to blame for this out­break since these bat pop­u­la­tions grew out of con­trol with the in­tro­duc­tion of read­i­ly avail­able sources of food in the form of cat­tle.

Since this out­break, the pop­u­la­tions of vam­pire bats have been kept un­der con­trol such that the chances of a per­son con­tract­ing ra­bies to­day from a bat are mi­nus­cule. As a mat­ter of fact, re­search con­duct­ed from 1971 to 2010 on 3,838 vam­pire bats in Trinidad in­di­cates that on­ly 0.03 per cent ex­am­ined car­ried ra­bies. This means that be­yond the re­mote chance of a vam­pire bat bit­ing you, there is very lit­tle like­li­hood of you con­tract­ing ra­bies from that bat.

Bats have al­so been clas­si­fied as ver­min as they are of­ten un­fair­ly ac­cused of dam­ag­ing crops. Re­search the world over shows us that bats of­ten times fo­cus their at­ten­tion on over-ripe fruits which are re­ject­ed for hu­man con­sump­tion.

Ad­mit­ted­ly, bats can be a nui­sance if they take up res­i­dence in your house. Again, we are part­ly to blame for this, as we are the ones who have en­croached on their habi­tat. Bats do not cre­ate nests in hous­es, and do not chew through ca­bles.

Giv­en their val­ue to us, I would like to plead with peo­ple to hu­mane­ly re­move bats from their prop­er­ty. For ad­vice on this, as well as in­for­ma­tion on the amaz­ing bats of T&T, you can go to www.trini­bats.com.

Bats are in trou­ble the world over. It is time for T&T to recog­nise how blessed we re­al­ly are to have about 70 species pro­vid­ing us with ben­e­fits. These an­i­mals should be pro­tect­ed, and I hope that the pow­ers that be evolve in their think­ing im­me­di­ate­ly and re­move them from the ver­min list.

Luke Ros­tant, PhD,

Co-or­di­na­tor, Diplo­ma/MSc Bio­di­ver­si­ty Con­ser­va­tion and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment in the Caribbean, UWI