Stop scapegoating bats for virus “spillover”
On the eve of Earth Day, let’s end the search for an animal to blame for the Coronavirus. Instead, let’s focus on protecting animal habitats — the only real solution to ensuring this doesn’t happen again.
I’m on hangouts chatting with my sister, a stream ecologist, when I mention all the bad press bats have been getting. She almost bursts into tears, telling me how this recent article by NPR, and others like it, caused hundreds of calls and emails to bat specialists about how to find habitats and destroy them.
After I look it up, I’m suddenly seeing alarmist bat articles everywhere. NYT published this article in late January going into detail about bat’s ability to carry a multitude of viruses and stating “SARS and MERS epidemics were caused by bat coronaviruses, as was a highly destructive viral epidemic in pigs.”
There’s not actually definitive evidence that SARS, MERS or Ebola were caused by bat viruses. Merlin Tuttle, a leading bat researcher (who founded and directed Bat Conservation International for 30 years) examined over 4,000 research papers on Ebola and MERS only to find a distinct lack of evidence on connection to human disease.
Even when evidence about a disease’s origins emerges — as it did when it definitively linked MERS to camels — researchers still try to place the blame on bats. As per usual, the instinct is to view camels as a “reservoir host” for the disease and bats as the original reservoir, even though there is no evidence of their role in transmission.
The Times article also mentions rabies, even though bats contract rabies far less than other animals. In the United States and Canada, bats are responsible for 1.5 human deaths annually. Americans are more likely to contract leprosy or the plague than rabies from a bat.
Add to that the recent conspiracy theory that the bat coronavirus somehow escaped a Wuhan lab where it was being researched and infected the public — and you can see just how far this fear-mongering has gone.
In the cable, the diplomats said: “from a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
While I understand why virologists would want to identify the carrier of SARS-CoV-2, the obsession by news outlets to alert the public to every new clue makes it feel like we’re trying to track down a serial killer. The message it sends to the public is: we’re going to stop at nothing to find out which animal is to blame for this. It says: there’s only one way to prevent this, and it’s to throw millions of dollars into attempting to definitively pin this on bats.
The message scientists should be sending to the public is: this happened because of our systematic mistreatment of animals and constant encroachment on their habitats.
In this moment of heightened fear and anxiety, describing the number of coronaviruses bats carry is like signing a warrant for the decimation of bat habitats everywhere. Instead of focusing on how exceedingly rare it is for a bat to even bite a human, it’s telling us we can’t coexist with bats without unwittingly being exposed to all kinds of possible pandemic causing viruses.
Step 1: Ban the sale of live & exotic animals at wet markets
What’s more important here — the fact that maybe a bat transferred the virus to a pangolin — or the fact that the wet markets were the virus likely started are already back up and running? How about the fact that China is heavily monitoring and censoring new research in order to control the narrative about how the virus started?
If there’s proof that bats host numerous coronaviruses, and spillovers happen all the time, then why not regulate the sale of bats in Chinese markets? Or identify the areas with the greatest risk of spillover and keep people from entering those habitats with a high abundance of bats? Perhaps we should use a bit of common sense, rather than rushing to destroy more bat habitats. Wet markets, with live, exotic animals packed in close quarters, are not only cruel — they are a soup of pathogens as animals under high stress are more likely to become transmission sources of disease. They are as bad for human health as they are for the critically endangered species that are being sold for a novelty meal or remedy for ED.
If we want to prevent another global pandemic, we should put as much effort into banning these inhumane practices, stopping the wildlife trade, and expanding protected habitats as we are into isolating the exact place that the virus crossed over.
China’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for exotic species threatens humanity with serious diseases, but it’s also accelerating extinction. Not only has the pandemic racked up a human death toll, but more elephants and rhinos are being poached because tourism is down. Ivory still floods the black markets in China. We’re hearing a lot about the pangolin lately, as a possible intermediary species passing the coronavirus to humans. Fixating on their possible involvement overlooks the fact that they are the world’s most trafficked non-human mammal.
Tens of thousands of pangolins are poached every year, killed for their scales for use in traditional Chinese medicine and for their meat, a delicacy among some ultra-wealthy in China and Vietnam.
We are all concerned about deadly epidemics, especially since we are currently living through one. But how many of us care about the natural world? The more animal habitat we destroy, the more frequent these epidemics will get, no matter whether our fixation with bats actually yields any concrete evidence of a spillover.
Identifying where exactly SARS-CoV-2 originated will not stop spillovers from happening. If we don’t save our forests and protect and expand animal habitats, history will repeat itself.
Bats have somehow come to represent everything we fear and hate in nature. The focus on potential diseases in bats by so many news outlets is not going to protect human health. It will, however, contribute to a spread of misinformation that has a ripple effect as it stokes fear, jeopardizes conservation efforts and misallocates funds toward research that won’t solve our problems.
The irony of the moment is that being stuck inside, we are all also yearning to get outside. To feel the sun on our skin, take a walk through the park, hear birds singing. If we harnessed that desire to feel close to nature in order to plant a garden, build a bat house, or swap out some grass for low-water, butterfly-friendly flowers we’d be taking a big step in the right direction.
Instead of robbing the ecosystem of our valuable crop pollinators and mosquito-eaters, what if we built habitats for them?
Step 2: Scientists need to help change the narrative
This kind of reporting isn’t serving anyone — people don’t want it, and bats are dying because of it. Too much funding is being funneled into identifying the host species for SARS-CoV-2.
There are over 1,400 species of bats worldwide, and a lot we don’t know about them. Bats are some of the only animals that are able to learn to mimic specific sounds, and they can also be taught tricks. Studying how they learn to copy noises could help us understand a lot more about the way their brains work. It could also provide clues to how language developed in humans. After all, learning to imitate a sound is complex: you have to memorize it, practice producing it, and compare it against what you’ve heard.
Then there are diseases like white-nose syndrome, which is estimated to have killed more than six million bats nationwide. White-nose syndrome wakes bats up during hibernation, which causes them to exert energy looking for food when there is none available. With their energy stores depleted and no food to be found, the bats starve. Because of this, white-nose syndrome is nearly always fatal for bats who catch it. There is no cure, and as of September 2017, the disease had spread to 31 states in the U.S.
More funding for conservation and research about the different species of bats, the way they communicate, their habitats and migrations — would be far more useful then poking and prodding them in search of COVID-19.
Step 3: Your actions matter when it comes to habitat conservation
Our collective voices and actions hold tremendous power. On the very first Earth Day 50 years ago, nearly 20 million people took part in demonstrations, marches, and environmental cleanups across the United States. In the end, one-tenth of the population showed up in support of environmental reform.
The enormous response prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation protecting the environment. Then-president Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and landmark laws were passed by Congress, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Add your voice to the movement. Over 200 people commented on the NYT bats article, many of them defending the bats. The more we all raise our voices in defense of bats, the more that the scientific community and the media will have to respond by paying greater attention to what stories they are telling and how they are telling them.
You can reach editors at the NYT here: Contact The New York Times
- Email the Editor, Letters@nytimes.com, corrections@nytimes.com
- Facebook @nytimes
- Twitter @nytimes
Merlin Tuttle has a comprehensive article on this which includes a bigger list of fear-mongering bat stories that big-name publications have put out there and a list of all the contacts for those publications. Editors do listen — especially if they receive many similar complaints.
Bats are cool. If we protected them and helped to increase their habitats and boost their populations, we could expect to see huge environmental benefits:
- Bats consume tons of crop and yard pests nightly, currently saving farmers $3.7 billion of dollars annually. Imagine a world where more farmers invited bats onto their property, and in doing so drastically reduced their reliance on expensive, harmful pesticides. Such widespread support for bats and proactive habitat creation on farms could save U.S. farmers 22.9 billion a year.
- Bats are pollinators. Do you like margaritas? Without bats, we wouldn’t have tequila. That’s right, bats pollinate agave plants. Desert-dwelling long-nosed bats sip the nectar of cacti and agave flowers, getting themselves covered with pollen in the process.
Other cool things about bats?
- Some species live for up to 40 years, making them the longest living mammal of that size.
- They occupy every niche, some are even scorpion specialists, some are fish eaters!
- They fly with their fucking hands. Why not a round of applause?
You don’t need to wait for the government to protect habitats. You can build a crash pad for these furry, flying mammals yourself, or buy a ready-made bat house. If you have a bit of space in your garage and some extra time, building your own bat box is somewhat complicated but also incredibly rewarding and might make the perfect DIY pandemic project. If you decide to buy, check out these criteria for selecting a high-quality bat house.
You won’t regret having these incredible mammals as neighbors when they start ridding your garden of pests, and your backyard of mosquitos. If you’re a gardener, you can also add bat guano to your compost. It’s rich in microbes, which can help clean up toxic chemicals used in farming. The microbes also speed up soil decomposition, making guano a great compost activator.
On the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, it’s time end the witch hunt and focus on the positives
It’s time to put an end to the narrative around bats and disease. Fear and anxiety are running rampant, and it’s not a productive use of time or resources to panic people. We also know that people want good news, now more than ever. Why not feed that need instead?
While our immediate future is threatened by the fallout from the Coronavirus pandemic, the fate of humanity is threatened by a massive loss of biodiversity. Instead of financing in the hunt for rare viruses in bats, let’s invest in habitat restoration. Instead of fear-mongering headlines, let’s tell people the good news: by restoring our forests and protecting wildlife both in parks and our own backyards, we can stop this from happening ever again.
