Rot And Rancid

KIM— “His name is Steve. He is my fiance.”

LOGIC (failure)— You guys are best friends and you haven’t met steve yet? This guy is NOT real.

HALF LIGHT— Kill steve.

(NEW TASK: KILL STEVE)

VOLITION— What? No!!

HALF LIGHT— okay.

Chaim Soutine Flayed Rabbit (Le Lapin écorché)

After this article went up, I got some more data from the Department of the Interior, that I had requested before writing it, and I just finally sorted and wanted to share.

In short, over the course of 1.75 years, 22,426 bats came legally into the U.S., 23% of which went to oddities/sales shops, 70% went to museums/academic/research, and 7% were unknown/redacted. More info below the cut. 

I haven’t been able to get a clear answer, with most sellers claiming that they died of “natural causes”.

I’m not sure how accurate this is, but here is what I have pieced together so far.

The bats used to make mummies are caught in butterfly nets and killed by being sealed in a container with “mothballs” (likely camphor or naphthalene).

The skulls are sifted out of guano collected from bat caves. The guano is mixed with water and the air pockets in the skulls cause them to float to the top.

The skeletons are made from bats that failed to properly mummify and carcasses collected from cave floors.

Again, I can’t verify if any of this is true, but it’s the only information I have been able to find.

Here is a list of some species often sold and their conservation statuses (as of February 2018).

I recommend avoiding the Data Deficient species since they could be threatened.

Near Threatened:

Kerivoula pellucida (clear-winged woolly bat)

Data Deficient:

Hipposideros macrobullatus (big-eared roundleaf bat)

Minipterus shortridgei (Shortridges’s Long-fingered bat)

Otomops formosus (Javan mastiff bat)

Least Concern:

Chaerephon plicatus (Wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat)

Cynopterus brachyotis (lesser short-nosed fruit bat)

Cynopterus minutus (minute fruit bat)

Cynopterus sphinx (greater short-nosed fruit bat)

Eonycteris spelaea (cave nectar bat)

Hipposideros bicolor (bicolored roundleaf bat)

Hipposideros diadema (diadem leaf nosed bat)

Hipposideros madurae (Maduran leaf-nosed bat)

Kerivoula picta (painted bat)

Macroglossus minimus (long-tongued nectar bat)

Miniopterus medius (intermediate long-fingered bat)

Pipistrellus/Hypsugo imbricatus (brown pipistrelle)

Pipistrellus javanicus (Javan pipistrelle)

Rhinolophus acuminatus (acuminate horseshoe bat)

Rhinolophus lepidus (Blyth’s horseshoe bat)

Rhinolophus luctus (woolly horseshoe bat)

Rousettus leschenaultii (Leschenault’s rousette)

Scotophilus kuhlii (lesser Asiatic yellow bat)

Taphozous melanopogon (black-bearded tomb bat)

Some things I have learned since writing that article:

Some sellers claim their stuff comes from “bat farms” but no one has ever been able to point to the existence of any bat farm on planet earth. They’re probably impossible.

I was just in Bali looking at skulls and seeing what kind of dead animals were for sale. Now I didn’t do a lot of research while I was there but I will actually point out most dead animals I saw for sale were not really suspicious. I didn’t see any dead bats, but I wasn’t really seeking them out. I did see some live bats (huge flying foxes) for sale in Jakarta.

I also learned: One of the people I quoted in the article who talks about how bad it is to buy dead bats, who told me he would never do it, DID IT ON TV. Before the interview. Something I learned from that experience: While he was nice, he did say some made-up wrong things, like that the expression on a dead bat’s face is from the pain it was in when it died. (False, they are dried in preservation, that is why they look like they’re grimacing sometimes.) I did not quote him on the things I knew were wrong, but when he started saying made-up things, in the future I might just drop the whole interview when that happens.

If I had time, I would love to do another article to update this, since I wrote it in 2017. I do sometimes see reporting grants for environmental topics, so maybe I’ll try to get one, but it is hard and I am pretty busy. I’d love to know if the importation of dead bats has slowed due to 1)Covid and 2) maybe this article? I know I’m not supposed to toot my own horn but, I really have seen a lot of awareness about this issue around oddities communities stemming from this article. Memes, people pledging not to buy bats anymore, petitions, etc.

Newsweek published this article in September 2020, titled “U.S. Imported Over 30,000 Bat Body Parts From China in Five Years, Report Finds.”

More photos of the Ice Age wolf head from Russia. The head, which was discovered in Siberia back in 2018, measures 16.4 inches long.