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[quote=Anonymous]I grew up in Southwest Georgia (US).  We had bats.  I'm not even sure of the variety but never once heard of anyone being bitten or getting one stuck in their hair, etc.  An animal that catches a moving object (an insect) while going super fast in low light conditions and using a radar system that an F35 would be envious of does not accidentally fly into hair, walls, or people.  A person to a bat would look like an entire cow sitting atop a hamburger bun to us.  The second the bat's radar pinged an object as large as a person, a small dog, a head of hair, whatever the bat would turn and go into a 4G vertical climb.  If trying to catch a bat, well yeah, something might happen but the bat sees you and has radar.  They don't go for humans.  We are not on their menu.

Bats are better mosquito control agents than purple martins but more people would put up the Martin Mansions or the Martin Gourd houses than bat houses.  Honestly, we never put up any bat houses and never had neighbors who did either.  My thoughts are that the bats we had probably preferred the nice hollow of a large oak tree that was still solid on the outside but rotting out in a small portion within the trunk.

We loved watching them dart around and eat bugs.  We used to sometimes mess with them in the evenings by throwing up small pieces of food but a bat's echolocation radar is so precise they can tell how large an object is or isn't while going 30 miles an hour.  They actually see quite well but use echolocation because it's more accurate than vision especially while flying and chasing a moving object the size of the end of a pen (a bug).  We never once noticed droppings and we'd have 10 - 15 bats every evening in the summer circling our patios and carriage house areas.  I guess if there were a 100 of them in a cave that would be different and they might make a mess but we never saw where they nested and never found them in our attic, etc.  I'm pretty sure they prefer a nice cool damp place over a dry hot one.  I now live in middle Tennessee and have been told there are huge populations in some of the cave formations near the Cumberland Plateau and East Knoxville but in all my years of hiking and even doing a little cave splunking when thinner I've never encountered a colony so I think they are pretty careful about where they choose to colonize.

I agree as some of the other posts referenced that I'd worry more about a raccoon, fox, or skunk being rabid than a bat.  I've had two bird dogs down in Georgia bitten by raccoons and they developed a condition called Acute canine idiopathic polyradiculoneuritis (ACIP) aka "coonhound paralysis" which is a progressive degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system and takes several weeks (at best) to many months and sometime never completely to heal.   The last bird dog I had contract ACIP had to be sent off to the University of Auburn for rehabilitation and she took almost 6 months to get over it and several thousand dollars later.

Bats are not so bad.  I seriously doubt a neighbor would even notice a bat house let alone the number of bats a bat house might draw, if it works at all.  I've never had luck getting bats to use a bat house and yet I still had bats so they are resilient species.   [/quote]

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