Welcome back, my friends, to Batwick here on the Epic Gardening podcast.

We are joined for our final episode with Dr. Merlin Tuttle, the father of modern bat conservation

and founder of Merlin Tuttle's bat conservation, as well as Teresa Nicta, the outreach and

collection manager at MTPC, and I think Merlin, you had mentioned in the first episode

with us that in your 60 years of study, you've never been attacked, never gotten a disease

from bats. It just sounds like there's a lot of misconceptions that the general public has

about bats, and maybe we could start with this whole idea of being bitten or attacked by them.

The truth is, we just fear naturally what we understand least, and unfortunately we generally

don't understand much about bats. Most of them have never even been studied beyond giving them a name.

We see them darting around unpredictably in the night, which tends to make them look a bit scary

to begin with. They're actually, they have probably one of, if not, the finest track record historically

of any animal and not transmitting disease to humans. It is exceedingly rare to get any disease

from a bat, and for anyone who just doesn't pick up a bat, and if you can pick up a bat,

that means it's sick. It's smart enough to get away from you if it's not sick.

But if you pick up a bat and get bitten by it, and then are foolish enough not to have that

checked out, I mean you can still get vaccinated if need be for rabies have the bat tested.

They're just no excuse for getting even rabies from bat, and they're only one to two cases per year

out of hundreds of millions in all the US and Canada combined that get any disease from a bat.

It feels like it would be way easier to get rabies from almost any other mammal than a bat, right?

Well I point out we, you know, I love dogs and cats, I've had my own dogs, but you know what,

dogs kill more Americans annually in outright attacks than have been proven to be killed by bat disease,

worldwide in all recorded history.

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