Melanie Elliott has rescued many bats over the years, including Batrick and Elizabat whom she keeps for educational programs.
She keeps the rescued bats in her home in separate containers and releases them in the spring to their natural territory when she can – which is not the city.
“Their favourite place to live is in a cave, and we have no caves in Saskatchewan,” Elliott said. “So I’m finding more and more these bats are seeking out warm attics and places to live.”
Elliott says bats are often misunderstood and don’t pose too much of a safety risk. However, when rescuing bats she always takes the proper precautions, wearing leather gloves in case of disease such as rabies.
“For me, handling them, it’s pretty obvious they have rabies,” she said. “They will bite my glove and they won’t let go.”
She has seen firsthand the environmental stressors bats can face – one of the factors studied at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, where new research has found stressed bats are more likely to spread diseases to humans and other animals.
According to Vikram Misra, researcher and professor of veterinary microbiology, bats have an interesting relationship with their viruses.
“Bats have viruses and they’re harmless viruses and they get along very well with bats. But once we start stressing the bats by doing all sorts of things, then the chances of them transferring those viruses to us increases – so when we threaten bats, we get threatened by bats.”
These stressors include loss of habitat, having to travel farther to get food, or when bats have to come out of hibernation early.
Additonally, when a bat’s habitat is disrupted they’re more likely to come into contact with people and other animals they wouldn’t normally come into contact with, which also increases the spread of diseases.
Misra says getting infected with white nose syndrome, a fungal infection affecting bats across North America, can also be a stress on bats.
“All of a sudden the stress of having that fungal infection makes them produce a lot more virus,” he said. “We think this is a model for why some viruses – (ones) that are much more dangerous than the virus we have here – spill over from bats into people.”
Misra hopes the research will lead people to take steps towards minimizing stress on bats, preventing the spread of diseases.
