Recently, I came across a decidedly strange op-ed in the New York Times relating to a mentally unstable woman’s encounter with a bat. Freaking out about seeing a bat–which did not bite or even touch her at all–she exhibited a complete inability to cope with wildlife. She and her husband ended up spending $600 or thereabouts on rabies shots and made multiple calls to animal control and somehow ended up blaming Trump for an unsafe world where people might be threatened with bat encounters without the ability to have it dealt with by government employees paid for by taxpayer dollars. The commentaries I read connected with this op-ed had a lot of negative comments to make about the woman and her freaking out for no good reason for simply seeing a bat.

As it happened, this evening, just after my mother arrived to Oregon at the place where I stay when she is in town–and a fair bit the rest of the year as well–I was told that there was a bat who was understandably afraid of the cat that was on the deck. I took a look at the bat–it was a small bat and though it looked a bit stunned, it soon showed itself to be alive if unable to fly, hobbling its way around the deck, climbing up the corner of the wall on the outside of the house, and then falling and then crawling to what will hopefully be a relatively safe place for the bat to recover its strength and heal up. As it happens, a bat has every reason to be just as frightened of human beings as we have of being afraid of them, and even if the bat was injured for some reason we could not identify obviously, it had an immense tenacity to live that was admirable and we were all cheering it on. Perhaps, hopefully, the bat realized it was not among enemies.

How are we to view animals like bats, and how are they to view us? Most of the time, human beings and bats live parallel lives in the same kind of environment. We have our own business and it need not involve the other at all. Bats are mostly interested in fruit and flies, and our cities and farms and neighborhoods have large amounts of both that are easily accessible to bats. Yet although bats are not very dangerous as far as animals go, at least not directly, there are certainly large amounts of fears about bats, about their role in spreading diseases like rabies and Covid-19 and the like. And bats, I am sure, if they were communicative, would have plenty of reasons to fear human beings for the harm that we can do to them. Certainly some people are hostile to bats, and many more people view creatures around them with fear rather than a safe sort of curiosity that does not behave recklessly but shows interest in what is around us.

From the beginning of my life, my own attitudes to wild animals have been shaped by the generally benign interactions I have had with them, from humorous sights of birds to friendly encounters with animals like skunks and chill raccoons as well as today’s seemingly wounded or handicapped bat. What do my dear readers think about their animal encounters? What kind of wild animals have you all seen and met in the course of your lives? If you would like to share your comments, I would love to see them.