Are bats cute?

Hell yeah they’re cute!

10

Not this one.

I think most bats are cute, I guess if I had to rate them it would be about an 8.
I like weird looking things. My Chinese Crested rates a 10 in my book and year after year her breed is voted Worlds Ugliest Dog.

Yes, yes they are.

I don’t know about cute but they are delicious. batatouille is most assuredly the bee’s knees

When they get into people’s houses, do people kill them?

@elijahsuicide I had a Chinese Crested growing up. He lived for 22 years. The thing was so ugly, but oh so cute!

Cute or not, they’ll always be better than pidgeons.

2 or 3

So far, bats have been rated between 2 and 8 in generally perceived cuteness! That’s quite a range!

I guess I can see both sides here. Are there any other animals that have such wide ranges of generally perceived cuteness?

opossum

The White Owl.

Pig

I love bats! I used to date a guy whose backyard was woods and he said that they would fly down over the pool on warm summer nights sometimes, but I never saw them.

they also eat a shitload of mosquitos every night

@KatawaGrey That’s what I do! We have woods behind our house and I love to sit in the pool at dusk and watch the bats.

@jonsblond 22 years?! Wow that’s amazing. I hope mine lives that long.
@KatawaGrey some summer nights we turn the light on in the pool, and we float for hours watching the comets above and bats swoop down around us.

@elijahsuicide He fell off my parents deck (10 ft) at least 3 times and survived. We joked that he was trying to commit suicide. The poor thing was blind and took insulin shots.

My fear of bats is making their cuteness lower. Those things terrify me. The thought of one in my hair gives me the heebie jeebies.
I give them a 5.

@jonsblond aw the poor little guy :-(
It did make me laugh though.

Bats are cute—7.5
I think pretty much all baby animals are cute.

1______________5______________10
Bugs . . . . . . . . . Birds . . . . . . kittens/baby polar bears

Bugs are -3
Spiders -10

@jonsblond and @elijahsuicide: That must be lovely! As the only mammals that can fly, they fascinate me!

@KatawaGrey at first I thought you meant Chinese Cresteds…
It took me a second to realize you meant bats.

sort of cute but they have teeth >__>

Very cute

(I’ve always thought it would be cool to rehab baby bats, but with the rabies situation in North Carolina, it’s not legal to raise baby bats.)

@FiRE MaN My cat and dog have teeth, too, and they’re still cute.

@syz What is the rabies situation in North Carolina??

@elijahsuicide: If Chinese Cresteds could fly…

When they get into people’s houses, do people kill them?

Why would people kill them? That would be too messy.
It happened to DH’s family, they made their father get them out of the house. I would probably run screaming and either call my husband or father and make them get the bat out of the apartment. I would never kill one.

@casheroo We’ve had over a thousand confirmed cases over the past three years (according to the NCVMA). We got caught between three distinct rabies “populations”:

Three distinct epizootics (epidemics in animals) of rabies have invaded North Carolina’s terrestrial wildlife
population since 1990, and the number of recorded rabid animals in the state has grown dramatically. A raccoon
rabies epizootic from the Southeast which began in Florida in the 1940s slowly spread during the intervening
decades, entered Mecklenburg and Union Counties in 1992, and spread from there.
A second epizootic of rabies in raccoons came from the Mid-Atlantic States. It spread from animal to animal from
its point of origin in West Virginia (after translocation of infected raccoons from Florida to West Virginia), and
entered Alleghany County in 1991. This epizootic moved south and east through North Carolina and joined with the
epizootic from the Southeast, creating a massive rabies epidemic from Florida to Maine.
The last epizootic of rabies spread out of the northern mid-Western states into eastern Tennessee, southwestern
Virginia, and finally into Ashe County. This epizootic has not spread as quickly as the other two epizootics. Source

As a result, state law has severely limited what species of animals wildlife rehabilitators can legally handle. Everything else gets euthanized (including bats from houses and raccoons from trash cans, even if they never came anywhere near a human).
April 2007

No bats where I live. The only things that comes into my house that I kill are spiders and stinging insects. My cats pretty much take care of everything else. Spiders and stinging insect could hurt me or my furry kids, so they must go. If anything else got into my house I’d call some people who knew what they were doing. But NO killing.

Bats are wonderful animals, much needed, much undervalued. I am a big fan of bats. I have a Valentine’s bat that I hang above my cubicle in February, with little heart stickers arranged on it. I have a pair of silver pendant sleeping-bat earrings. I spent many hours embroidering a bat on the back of a fleece jacket. I love bats.

But I have to say they are not cute.

I also do not consider the ends of the continuum to be ‘cute’ and ‘gross.’ I think very many beautiful and respectable beasts are not cute (unless revoltingly Disneyfied). Elephants. Elks. Tigers. Wolves. Cobras. Are they cute? No. Are they gross? Certainly not.

Bats aren’t cute, and some have ugly noses by human standards, but they are handsome and in their own way quite magnificent. They are not the kittens of the aerial world, but neither are they the cockroaches.

However, baby anythings (except insects) are cute. Baby warthogs are cute. Baby rhinos. Kittens aren’t a species. They’re a stage of development for a species. Anything at that stage is cute.

@Jeruba Even the baby version of this is not cute.

@syz: What percentage of feral cats have rabies?

Well, I’ll give you an exception for that, @syz. His mother loves him, though.

@syz…who gave you that picture of my junk?

@girlofscience I can’t find any good studies on rate of infection in feral populations, although there are several unsubstantiated references to a 4% infection rate. There’s a pretty comprehensive article here in Veterinary Technician Magazine.

@syz: Do you work nights? If so, you may have met my friend the other week. Her Siamese son came in because he broke his leg when he fell off a table.

@Blondesjon Are you talking about this one? If it’s you, I would have had to have gotten it from jonsBlonde, right? (wink, wink)

@girlofscience I’m afraid I’m the dreaded “management” now and don’t actually handle animals anymore :(

@syz….Nope This one. so what if it’s got a coupla teeth? I AM NOT AN ANIMAL. I AM A HUMAN BEING.

@Blondesjon Ah, I thought you were talking about this kind of “junk”.

@syz Wow. Thanks for the information. Another reason to never go back to NC ;)

I unfortunately have a few hundred living in my attic. I’ve been trying for the past 2 years to get them out and have had very little luck. They are creative little buggers. I’ve also had about 7 come into my house over the past 3 years. I’ve come up with a very good technique. I wait for them to land, place a shoebox over them and then slide a piece of cardboard underneath. There is no reason to kill the bats as they are just as freaked out as you to be in your house + they each kill 1000’s of bugs every night. I have to say though I don’t find them very cute, basically a mouse with wings. I would rate them as a 4.

I think bats are cute, rating about a 9 on your cuteness scale. I think baby bats a very cute, with a rating of 10. I have s friend who had pet bats (with appropriate permits) and they were lovely animals.

I think mice are cute, too, even though I am very allergic to them and so cannot go near them.

Yes! :)

No. -1

OMG. Yes. Bats are like an 11. The little fuzzy ones that just curl up into a ball? Adorable!

We now have a spread all the way from -1 to 11!!!

These bats are interesting, but I don’t know about cute.

In a small town in the middle of Kakadu National Park, hundreds of sugar or fruit bats roost in the trees during the day. They are big with a wing span of about 12 inches or more. They are kind of cute but jeez do they smell up the place. The aboriginal people eat them and I have sampled a lot of strange foods with them but there is no way I could get past the smell of these guys. You can see a pic at this site:

http://www.jabiru.nt.gov.au/council/content/view/full/260?PHPSESSID=11d8c8983722c6ebb5039350fab6542a

I think they are adorable.

I have to admit. I am absolutely astounded by the amount of people that think bats are cute!

I don’t think bats are cute.

Probably the same people who would think a NYC street rat was cute.

Bats are rats with wings.

No, pigeons are rats with wings.

Small, pet rats are cute.

By Darwin-
“No, pigeons are rats with wings.”

This. I lived in NYC from age 3 to 13. You’d have to be considerably convincing to get me to believe that bats get that dirty.

Pigeons aren’t cute, either.

Actually, I find pigeons to be quite attractive. It is just their tendency to poop on the heads of my guests that I dislike.

Yes, I rather feel the need to put in a word for the much-maligned pigeon. They may be dirty, but they can hardly help that, and they do display a very smooth and compact aesthetic as they meander about. Above all, they certainly have character.

I guess Bats are kind of cute…...I would give it a 7

When I lived in Texas, I had a friend who had a home west of Austin. There was an abandoned railroad tunnel in the area. Around sunset, we could see bats by the thousands, swarming out of the tunnel. From a distance it looked like a large swarm of mosquitoes.

By the way, I give bats (even this one) a 6–10 on the cuteness scale,

Thanks, everyone! Some awesome answers here.

I think this was a really fun question. :)

bats are scary when they fly. The way they move freaks me out.

I don’t like cockroaches but zero is a little low: say, a 3. They have style, insects do (ever read Archy and Mehitabel?) Bats would rate a 6. In the daylight they hang in the eaves and chill. At night they wheel about catching insects.

Hell yes they’re cute.

When the bats come out it’s fun to throw pebbles up in the air near them. Their sonar homes in on them.