silverwolfcc (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silverwolfcc) wrote2020-04-02 12:32 pm
silverwolfcc) wrote2020-04-02 12:32 pm
Entry tags:
Don't Eat Bats!
Bats are friends, not food!
They are the doggos of the sky!
They are cute and friendly -- and also the most disease ridden plague-carriers pretty much on the planet, yup, even more than rats. In fact, not only should you not eat them? Don't handle them at all.
Like birds, bats have internal body temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 degrees Celsius) to let them handle altitudes, flying, and winter well. This is a temperature at which if you are running a human fever that high, you risk dying. Bats have an additional dangerous component to human digestion over birds in that they primarily eat mosquitoes, flies, and pathogen carriers. Thus, a lot of bats have immunological defenses that protect them against such pathogens, which humans are incapable of dealing with, not even with all the antibiotics and anti-virals in the world!
They are an important part of the world's Ecosystems, and help clean the air and fertlize new grounds, turning what is lethal to humans (and other tastier livestock!) into HEALTHY HELPFUL environs for all!
Spiritually and culturally, many religions hold bats as unclean (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Native Americans, Shinto) because of their diet; but also as possible blessings and good luck because they keep the area free of dangerous pests.
1. Bats' Diet:
Mosquitoes
True Bugs
Moths
Beetles
- Some species (vampire bats) drink blood (of livestock, not humans) which makes them dangerous to humans for blood illnesses, and some eat fruits, or flower nectar - but in the case of the latter; this makes them invaluable pollinators like hummingbirds, and bees, and they STILL can carry a host of diseases that they aren't affected by but humans are!
2. Bat Diseases that can be transmitted to humans:
-- Rabies - the most obvious one and why people are scared of them. Rabies is scary in ANY animal, but bats are the only ones who can get it that fly!
-- Ebola
-- Coronaviruses including SARS, and Covid-19 (and others!!!)
-- Henipaviruses like Nipah and Hendra
In order to eat insects and survive flying, bats have a highly specialized immune system! In fact rather than having lots of antibodies to diseases; their immune systems' response is *lowered*! In humans this would make us weak to everything, but in bats, who are not land-bound; their immune systems do not trigger overreactions to viruses and therefore coronaviruses and henipaviruses do not kill them!
3. Evolution
If you've been clicking all these links and paying attention, you may have noticed a common theme with all these viruses: they primarily attack the central nervous systems, and/or are respiratory illnesses! This again harkens back to being the only Earth flying mammal!
Birds don't just have lungs (like mammals)! They have extra air sacs which enables the act of flying even more easily! Like hot air balloons, their bodies are very light and highly geared towards rapid and easy ventilation!
Bats are mammals! They don't have this! They have mammal lungs, like humans!
In order to compensate for all of this; bats actually intake oxygen at a rate comparable to birds; by utilizing far more muscle, and requiring much bigger and stronger hearts! Their lungs are the strongest and largest per body volume of all mammals; unsurprisingly, and consequently many of the aforementioned viruses can co-exist in the bats without harming them! In humans, we evolved to digest multiple different foods, and our lungs never reached the extreme conditions necessary for flight; instead humans physically evolved for long-term endurance hunting; wearing our prey down slowly! Both humans hearts and lungs are incapable of surviving the pressure that bats put on theirs; exertion which makes them survive viruses up above! That's why the most lethal bat viruses affect respiratory and/or central nervous systems. Bats can carry many other diseases that humans can ignore because they don't add additional strain to our own physiology.
Meanwhile, even the fruit bats have more developed digestive systems because they branched off the same way! They're able to handle neurotoxins and pollutants (they also have a shorter lifespan than humans so just as fish can accumulate mercury in their systems without dying from it, humans can't handle the constant build-up!) which can lead to severe central nervous system illnesses!
Furthermore, while we've already made great strides in learning from bats' echolocation and wing structures, we have no idea what else we have yet to learn from bats in the future!
4. Cultural Taboos
There are two lines of thought when it comes to human consumption of meat; usually both on polar opposite ends! Whether for or against carnivorous consumption: that all meat is on equal moral grounds. Either that PETA is right and meat is murder; or that it doesn't matter if you eat a dog, dolphin, elephant, whale, or chicken. Meat is meat. (Except when it's not.) In between the two extremes, however, lies the idea that relgious meat restrictions exist for good reasons, even if they're not always outright obvious.
For instance, my dietary restrictions are nearly limited solely to foods native to the American continents. The more a food was evolved and cultivated by humans in Europe and mainland Asia, becoming more and more specialized to new strains; the less likely I am to tolerate it. So apples (central Asia), carrots (Afghanistan), olives (Greece), soy (Asia), Nutmeg (Africa), broccoli (Mediterranean) are all toxic for me! I also can't eat turkey, even though they're native to the Americas; the indigenous people didn't keep livestock and usually hunted deer, buffalo, and other plentiful mammals instead, modeling their hunting traditions much like wolf packs! Likewise I have to be careful with any dairy (milk and eggs) and the more my diet is the three sisters (squash, corn, and beans!) the better I do.
Not all descendants of any group of people have this problem, of course. Most people CAN PHYSICALLY freely digest against their ancestors' societal or moral taboos, but there are absolutely a percentage of people who will not be able to, and there's no way of knowing if you're one of them until it starts to negatively affect you!
Moreover, all cultures associate food, especially meals or feasts, with family, society, and general togetherness. Even the Pilgrims' first overture of friendship to the Native Americans was to try to thank them with a friendly Thanksgiving feast!
The physiological differences in bats and birds with regards to human consumption aside; chickens can and often are much loved as pets that also provide humans with eggs. Chickens are not terribly intelligent, and don't survive better or longer in the wild, in part because they've been cultivated as livestock for so long, but compared to bats, bats are ultimate survivors and do better with minimal human interference.
Jewish and Muslim Kosher and Halal foods respectively are generally for human safety purposes (see again: diseases), but in halal it's extended to try to prevent animal cruelty, and in nearly all religious instances: to help individuals feel better about themselves as a good person.
Native American tribes prided themselves on being able to never worry about famines; and feed well more than their population, so eating coyotes, bats, owls, or other non-herbivores (not including fish) was never considered because of the sheer entropy rate from the food chain!
The caution against eating bats wasn't just for disease and the health and safety of individuals, however! Bats play an important role in the ecosystem!
5. Bats are great for the environment!
- Bats are mosquitoes' biggest and best predator!
- Bats pollinate and disperse seeds just as well as bees, and since they are mammals and nocturnal, you're less likely to accidentally disturb them!
- Bat guano restores vital nutrients to the soil: BUT this is better away from humans as it can still carry other pathogens dangerous for humans and disperse wild fungi spores.
- Harkening back to the idea that not all meat is the same, bats have highly important social structures that aside from creating huge roosts; the way crows have murders, or wolves have packs, bat colonies, much like wolf packs and elephant herds, are hugely interconnected to the entire ecosystem and affect not just the plantlife, soil, insect consumption, but even all other animal species of the region!
So save a life, and don't eat bats! The life you save, might even just be your own!
They are the doggos of the sky!
They are cute and friendly -- and also the most disease ridden plague-carriers pretty much on the planet, yup, even more than rats. In fact, not only should you not eat them? Don't handle them at all.
Like birds, bats have internal body temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 degrees Celsius) to let them handle altitudes, flying, and winter well. This is a temperature at which if you are running a human fever that high, you risk dying. Bats have an additional dangerous component to human digestion over birds in that they primarily eat mosquitoes, flies, and pathogen carriers. Thus, a lot of bats have immunological defenses that protect them against such pathogens, which humans are incapable of dealing with, not even with all the antibiotics and anti-virals in the world!
They are an important part of the world's Ecosystems, and help clean the air and fertlize new grounds, turning what is lethal to humans (and other tastier livestock!) into HEALTHY HELPFUL environs for all!
Spiritually and culturally, many religions hold bats as unclean (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Native Americans, Shinto) because of their diet; but also as possible blessings and good luck because they keep the area free of dangerous pests.
1. Bats' Diet:
Mosquitoes
True Bugs
Moths
Beetles
- Some species (vampire bats) drink blood (of livestock, not humans) which makes them dangerous to humans for blood illnesses, and some eat fruits, or flower nectar - but in the case of the latter; this makes them invaluable pollinators like hummingbirds, and bees, and they STILL can carry a host of diseases that they aren't affected by but humans are!
2. Bat Diseases that can be transmitted to humans:
-- Rabies - the most obvious one and why people are scared of them. Rabies is scary in ANY animal, but bats are the only ones who can get it that fly!
-- Ebola
-- Coronaviruses including SARS, and Covid-19 (and others!!!)
-- Henipaviruses like Nipah and Hendra
In order to eat insects and survive flying, bats have a highly specialized immune system! In fact rather than having lots of antibodies to diseases; their immune systems' response is *lowered*! In humans this would make us weak to everything, but in bats, who are not land-bound; their immune systems do not trigger overreactions to viruses and therefore coronaviruses and henipaviruses do not kill them!
3. Evolution
If you've been clicking all these links and paying attention, you may have noticed a common theme with all these viruses: they primarily attack the central nervous systems, and/or are respiratory illnesses! This again harkens back to being the only Earth flying mammal!
Birds don't just have lungs (like mammals)! They have extra air sacs which enables the act of flying even more easily! Like hot air balloons, their bodies are very light and highly geared towards rapid and easy ventilation!
Bats are mammals! They don't have this! They have mammal lungs, like humans!
In order to compensate for all of this; bats actually intake oxygen at a rate comparable to birds; by utilizing far more muscle, and requiring much bigger and stronger hearts! Their lungs are the strongest and largest per body volume of all mammals; unsurprisingly, and consequently many of the aforementioned viruses can co-exist in the bats without harming them! In humans, we evolved to digest multiple different foods, and our lungs never reached the extreme conditions necessary for flight; instead humans physically evolved for long-term endurance hunting; wearing our prey down slowly! Both humans hearts and lungs are incapable of surviving the pressure that bats put on theirs; exertion which makes them survive viruses up above! That's why the most lethal bat viruses affect respiratory and/or central nervous systems. Bats can carry many other diseases that humans can ignore because they don't add additional strain to our own physiology.
Meanwhile, even the fruit bats have more developed digestive systems because they branched off the same way! They're able to handle neurotoxins and pollutants (they also have a shorter lifespan than humans so just as fish can accumulate mercury in their systems without dying from it, humans can't handle the constant build-up!) which can lead to severe central nervous system illnesses!
Furthermore, while we've already made great strides in learning from bats' echolocation and wing structures, we have no idea what else we have yet to learn from bats in the future!
4. Cultural Taboos
There are two lines of thought when it comes to human consumption of meat; usually both on polar opposite ends! Whether for or against carnivorous consumption: that all meat is on equal moral grounds. Either that PETA is right and meat is murder; or that it doesn't matter if you eat a dog, dolphin, elephant, whale, or chicken. Meat is meat. (Except when it's not.) In between the two extremes, however, lies the idea that relgious meat restrictions exist for good reasons, even if they're not always outright obvious.
For instance, my dietary restrictions are nearly limited solely to foods native to the American continents. The more a food was evolved and cultivated by humans in Europe and mainland Asia, becoming more and more specialized to new strains; the less likely I am to tolerate it. So apples (central Asia), carrots (Afghanistan), olives (Greece), soy (Asia), Nutmeg (Africa), broccoli (Mediterranean) are all toxic for me! I also can't eat turkey, even though they're native to the Americas; the indigenous people didn't keep livestock and usually hunted deer, buffalo, and other plentiful mammals instead, modeling their hunting traditions much like wolf packs! Likewise I have to be careful with any dairy (milk and eggs) and the more my diet is the three sisters (squash, corn, and beans!) the better I do.
Not all descendants of any group of people have this problem, of course. Most people CAN PHYSICALLY freely digest against their ancestors' societal or moral taboos, but there are absolutely a percentage of people who will not be able to, and there's no way of knowing if you're one of them until it starts to negatively affect you!
Moreover, all cultures associate food, especially meals or feasts, with family, society, and general togetherness. Even the Pilgrims' first overture of friendship to the Native Americans was to try to thank them with a friendly Thanksgiving feast!
The physiological differences in bats and birds with regards to human consumption aside; chickens can and often are much loved as pets that also provide humans with eggs. Chickens are not terribly intelligent, and don't survive better or longer in the wild, in part because they've been cultivated as livestock for so long, but compared to bats, bats are ultimate survivors and do better with minimal human interference.
Jewish and Muslim Kosher and Halal foods respectively are generally for human safety purposes (see again: diseases), but in halal it's extended to try to prevent animal cruelty, and in nearly all religious instances: to help individuals feel better about themselves as a good person.
Native American tribes prided themselves on being able to never worry about famines; and feed well more than their population, so eating coyotes, bats, owls, or other non-herbivores (not including fish) was never considered because of the sheer entropy rate from the food chain!
The caution against eating bats wasn't just for disease and the health and safety of individuals, however! Bats play an important role in the ecosystem!
5. Bats are great for the environment!
- Bats are mosquitoes' biggest and best predator!
- Bats pollinate and disperse seeds just as well as bees, and since they are mammals and nocturnal, you're less likely to accidentally disturb them!
- Bat guano restores vital nutrients to the soil: BUT this is better away from humans as it can still carry other pathogens dangerous for humans and disperse wild fungi spores.
- Harkening back to the idea that not all meat is the same, bats have highly important social structures that aside from creating huge roosts; the way crows have murders, or wolves have packs, bat colonies, much like wolf packs and elephant herds, are hugely interconnected to the entire ecosystem and affect not just the plantlife, soil, insect consumption, but even all other animal species of the region!
So save a life, and don't eat bats! The life you save, might even just be your own!