If you collect bones, oddities, or other natural history items, you've undoubtedly seen bat specimens for sale: framed with outstretched wings, hanging upside down inside a coffin-shaped box, skeletonized and articulated, or sealed inside a slab of acrylic.
But increasingly both scientists and oddities enthusiasts are calling for an end to the trade in bats, because there's no truly ethical way to source them. This is one of the reasons that I produce 3D printed oversized bat skulls: so you can have a very unique and extra interesting bat specimen, without any real bats having to be involved.
What does "ethically sourced" mean when it comes to collecting animal specimens?
People have different opinions on this, and aside from whether a species is legal to possess at all, it often comes down to what the individual consumer feels okay about from a moral standpoint. Some collectors might want only scavenged and found bones. Others may be fine with animals harvested through hunting and pest control, but not with products of fur farms. Some may be fine with hunted animals but not ones caught with a trap line. Sellers who are responsible in sourcing their animals will typically tell you where the specimens came from, but of course this has to be taken mostly on faith and on the seller's reputation in the community.
Why is ethical collection of bats not possible?
All specimens for sale are from wild bats.
Bats don't breed well in captivity and are not farmed. Any specimen you see for sale is an animal that has been removed from the wild. (Though there is a trade now in bats bred by zoos and sold to exotic animal traders -- wtf, seriously -- the remains of those animals don't seem to be turning up in the collector market. Yet.)
Harvesting on a commercial scale has a huge impact on even populations that are not threatened or endangered.
Some bats roost in communal groups (depending on the species), and often in places like caves, which makes them easy to catch in large numbers. That means an entire colony of hundreds or even thousands of bats can be trapped and killed in a span of only a few days. People who harvest bats for collection do so to wholesale them, so they're producing large numbers of bat specimens, and the more bats they get the more money they make. Most bat species are fairly slow reproducers, having only one or two pups per female per year, so it can take decades for a population to be re-established from that kind of devastation, if it ever recovers at all.
Most bat species that are offered for sale either come from countries with poor animal conservation laws, or are illegally poached in their country of origin.
Many bats that are offered for sale are threatened or endangered species, and consumers driving demand for these bats only further puts the animals at risk of extinction. (A lot of bat species are also under-studied, so we don't really know how many there are and how vulnerable they may be.)
Often buyers are under the mistaken impression that if a specimen is openly for sale on a reputable website (like ebay or Etsy) that it must be legal to possess -- this is often not the case! And specimens may be mislabeled. You may think you're buying a legal animal when it's actually an endangered species (and importing those has serious legal ramifications!).
Bats are harvested specifically for the collectors market.
A big part of the problem with bat taxidermy is that the bats are killed specifically for the collector market, which just drives more demand for dead bats. With other commonly collected species, the animal's life was often taken for a different purpose: it was raised or hunted for meat, killed for pest control, raised for fur, etc. So bones for sale are a by-product of those other activities, and it's up to you to decide what sources you're okay with. But bats aren't very useful for any of those other things, so they're usually killed only for display. And unlike many other forms of taxidermy, which aren't that widely collected, dead bats are available so cheaply and in such numbers that they're not an unusual item; they're available as tourist trinkets and you can even buy a bat as a paperweight. Specimens that come in a clear block of acrylic are a particularly depressing example: most sellers don't even know what species of bat they're selling, so you don't know what species of bat you're buying, either.
Aren't some bats really found naturally deceased?
Sure, that does happen! Bats often roost in places like attics, so it's not uncommon for a homeowner or wildlife control professional to find the occasional body (usually mummified) of a bat local to their area. You don't typically see these for sale, though, and if you do it becomes a whole other complicated issue, as native wildlife is often far more illegal to possess than specimens from other countries. In the United States, state laws typically protect native bats, and those laws can vary widely from state to state. Some bats may be legal to possess and not others; if you collect one that is legal, it may become illegal if you move to the next state over and bring it with you.
Several species of bats with particularly vulnerable populations are also protected by federal laws under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956, which makes possession of them a federal crime.
If you have found or been given a native bat, your safest bet is to call your local wildlife agency and see whether the bat is legal to possess and what regulations may need to keep in mind if you have it in your collection. You might be able to keep it, but you may be required to have a license or other paperwork for it, so if you ever need to in the future you can show that it's possessed legally. Regardless, these aren't specimens you're finding on the collector's market, because there isn't a wholesale supply.
Laws around what sort of specimens can and can't be kept (and what areas they can be collected from) are often more complex and confusing than you'd think, which is one of the reasons that most of my collection these days is made of 3D printed replicas!
I was told my bat died for reasons other than the collectors market, like for disease control or because it's an invasive species. Could that be true?
Yes, sort of. But unfortunately that doesn't usually help the situation.
When bats are killed for reasons other than the collector market, those reasons are usually bad. For instance, there are vampire bat culling programs in Latin America aimed at reducing the spread of bat-borne diseases like rabies, but research shows the practice probably makes the problem worse. Similarly, the island nation of Mauritius culls its native fruit bats to protect fruit harvests, but the species is both endangered and endemic (it exists only on Mauritius), and is already under pressure from deforestation and hunting. (Two other fruit bat species once present on Mauritius are already extinct.)
I also haven't found any evidence of any bat species being invasive (though I'm happy to be corrected if anyone is aware of examples), but they are highly threatened themselves by all sorts of invasives introduced by humans, notably White Nose Syndrome, animals like domestic housecats that hunt them, and plants like invasive burdock that entangle them.
I bought a bat specimen from an artist who makes spooky taxidermy things. Did they poach a bat?!
It's very unlikely! They have probably purchased the bat from wholesalers or other vendors, and the bat was probably sourced from another country. This consumption still drives the demand for bats, but many collectors and artists are entirely unaware of the problems with bat collection, and some are aware but don't agree that it's an issue. You can certainly contact them and find out if they know about the issues surrounding bat collection, and what their stance on it is. And feel free to send them to this page for more information!
As curiosity cabinets and bone collections come back into style, it's important for buyers to ask themselves why certain animal parts are cheap to acquire, where those specimens are coming from, and what impact our collecting habits can have on animal populations.
Why is it important to preserve bats?
Aside from our general responsibility to not destroy everything we can get our hands on, bats are incredibly important members of their ecosystems. They eat insects that cause disease (take that, mosquitos!), they disperse seeds through their habitats, and they're important pollinators. (If you enjoy tequila, thank a bat.) The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that bats save farmers $1 billion every year that would otherwise be spent on pesticides that pose their own hazards to the environment. Like most forms of wildlife, they're already under threat from factors like climate change, deforestation, habitat destruction, and disease (often spread among different bat populations by humans). In addition to the collector trade, they're also killed for food and traditional medicine. Even collection of legal specimens for scientific research poses a risk to populations when it gets out of hand. So bats are already dealing with a lot, even before collectors come into it!
Unnecessary exposure to bats is also a public health risk. Bats can carry zoonotic diseases (ones that can be passed to humans), and it's unlikely that poachers collecting bats are wearing adequate personal protective equipment to prevent being exposed to pathogens. This can put their community, and by extension the global community, at risk of transmissible disease.
As long as people keep buying, bats will continue to be killed to fill that demand.
For all of these reasons, I don't buy bat specimens and strongly discourage others from doing so. There are some great alternatives that in my opinion are much cooler than the real specimens on the market, anyway! You can buy one of my 3D printed oversized bat skulls, get a life-sized replica from other sellers, buy some bat-themed jewelry, or even get your hands on an uncannily lifelike bat art doll from Wild Bendy Workshop. (I desperately want one of those myself!)
Australian Geographic - Stop buying these bats, scientists and conservationists plead