Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Vampire Bat Attack - The Spook-tacularly Rabid Halloween Special

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

The Vampire Bat, one of the signature animals of the Halloween season. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's right. Today we're talking about bats, specifically vampire bats. So, that's it. That's all I'm going to say. I listened back to some of the old intros on our episodes, and I realized that I talk for what seems like forever. So let's just be done. No more me.

Well, a little bit more me in the episode. But let's get to the rest of us. All right, we're here with me, Wes, and Jeff and Mike, my two favorite ghouls and goblins. Do you guys rather be a ghoul or a goblin? Oh, goblin for sure. Yeah, I agree. Goblins seem like they're more like mischievous and fun.

And they always have a bunch of treasure, I feel like. Yeah, goblins often guard something or like have treasure. Yeah, good point. Ghouls just kind of seem like they sit around and throw up on people. Would you rather be a gremlin or a goblin? Which gremlin? The hot one? The girl one?

Spider Gremlin. I'd want to be the bat gremlin. Yeah. Oh, funny you should say that. We're going to talk about bats today, but I don't think we're quite ready to get into it, are we? Are we not? I don't know. I guess we could.

Happy Halloween, though, guys, this is a special Halloween episode, and I'm excited about it because I kind of think Halloween's my favorite holiday. How do you guys feel about Halloween? Really? Yeah, it's up there. It's my favorite time of year, like September and October. I was thinking about it. I think Halloween has my favorite lead-up plus the day.

Christmas has like a great lead-up, but I always kind of get bummed on Christmas Day once it's over. But Halloween, I really like the actual day of Halloween. And then I think Thanksgiving is my favorite if you're just looking at the day. Just Thanksgiving Day is so fun. You and Mom have the same problem, though, where once it's like end of August, you guys are already like dreading winter. Yeah, we get some of that.

seasonal depressive stuff. You could probably still pass off as a kid and go trick or treating, right, Wes? I probably could. I could probably make a mask and you're good to go. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I love Halloween though. I love watching horror movies. I love getting spooked.

I love how pretty it is this time of year. It's just, to me, Halloween's like one of the more fun holidays. What's the best scary movie you've watched so far this season? I rewatch don't, or ready or not. not. I really like Ready or Not. Yeah, you love that one. Yeah. Have you seen Ready or Not, Mike? No. Is it that, is it an anthology or what is it? No, it just came out a couple years ago. It's about this girl who's marrying into this really rich family that built their fortune on like board games and stuff. And it takes a bit of a bit of a sinister turn in the movie. Sounds like,

yeah. Sounds like that movie sinister. Yeah, I guess. Mike, what's your favorite that you've watched so far? I watched the first Fantasm movie for the first time ever. And I really, really. So here's a hot take. I think the theme song to Phantasm is better than the Halloween theme, the John Carpenter synth music. I'll probably change my mind come next Halloween, but I'm feeling pretty strong right now. I'll watch it. I've never seen it.

Oh, you haven't? Yeah. I know it has those balls with little swords in them and stuff, but I don't know much about it. But I'll watch it. And there's a head exploding scene. Isn't there always? Those are good. Yeah.

Halloween 3 has a good one of those. Jeff, have you watched any good horror movies leading up to Halloween? Gremlin's 2. With the hot one? Yeah, I really did. And then I haven't watched a ton. Well, we're going to have to rectify that. Me and Jeff are both in Missoula, so we're going to definitely watch a scary movie.

Oh, Wes. Yeah. I have a question for you before we get started. So in the NBA, there's a... a player called Carl Anthony Towns. Uh-huh. Some people who don't follow sports might know, like, his mom, unfortunately, passed away from COVID and is, like, one of the more famous, like, early deaths.

Okay. But anyways, unrelated to that, he just said that he watches a video of two guerrillas fighting to the death to get himself pumped up every day. Really? And the more I've been thinking about it, I just don't believe him. Yeah, neither do I. Because I don't think there's videos of that. I don't think there is either.

Right? Maybe he got one from like some weird source. I don't think it's on like YouTube or something though. But I don't know. I've never looked it up. I don't think I've ever searched it. Yeah, one of those old, what live leak? Is that still a thing?

Yeah, maybe. It's a weird thing to lie about. But I don't think there's videos of that. Maybe he's just exaggerating. Maybe they're just like fighting really hard. There's like that one video of too big old silverbacks fighting in a zoo. Yeah. But it's like 10 seconds.

It's also a weird pump-pub. There's got to be like a King Kong versus like Mecca King Kong movie, right? Well, that just, oh, King Kong versus Mecca. Probably. You wouldn't know. Maybe he just watches King Kong. I don't know. That's, it's very strange.

That's strange that he said that and it's strange that's his pup-pup. Yeah. I guess everyone has their thing. He's a liar until proven otherwise. All right. My eyes. That's how justice works. All right.

Well, speaking to liars. Speaking of Halloween and bats, we are going to have a special episode today, and we're talking about a really, really cool critter, which is vampire bats. So really quickly, I want to just ask you guys off the top of this episode, what do you know about vampire bats? They can transform into humans? They can't. But what do you actually think you know about vampire bats?

They got some like long, pointy teeth. Okay. Do you know anything else about them? They hang upside down? They do hang upside down. They're not very big for bats. Okay, so you guys don't know much about vampire bats. Okay, that's fine.

I wanted to ask that because there's actually a lot of myths about vampire bats out there, and we're going to do our best to dispel some of them in this episode. But a really interesting thing to me is that a lot of the things that I thought were myths, the truth is actually like more fascinating. So it's kind of like, why would you even make that myth when this other thing to me is almost more fascinating and more scary in a way? So we're going to talk a lot about vampire bats because they are an animal that I think a lot of people don't know too much about. And because our stories are directly involved some of these facts, I'm going to talk a little bit about their biology to begin with. I think it'll help you visualize the stories a little bit

better and understand the stories a little bit better. The stories are pretty short. We don't have anything super long, but I think they're really interesting. And I think honestly, just these facts about vampire bats are pretty cool. So I'm going to just launch into it. So there are about a thousand bat species in the world. Only one of them feeds on the blood of mammals, and that's the common vampire bat. So there's two other species of vampire bats, and those typically feed on bird blood.

they've recently seen that they are starting to switch to mammal blood or some of them will sometimes feed on mammals. But really the common vampire bat is the one that mammal blood is what it goes for. Every other bat in the world is either eating like insects, fruit, maybe a couple other things. But vampire bats are the only ones that are eating blood. Is that all that they eat? Yeah. Oh, wow. They only eat blood.

So that's another really fascinating thing about them. Blood is it. They don't eat anything else. It's just blood. and their bodies developed all these crazy different things that it does to make sure that that works for them. So blood is enough. That's pretty creepy. Yeah, it is.

Well, you think about it, there are other animals that do that, like mosquitoes. You know, there's a few other animals that just drink blood, but it's kind of weird having an actual mammal that only drinks blood. Yeah, exactly. So is the way it drinks blood, it bites you with its sharp teeth and then you just like bleed into its mouth? Yes, we'll get into that. It doesn't like have suction in its teeth. I'm going to talk a lot about that. So I'll definitely, yeah.

But briefly before that, so they're found from northern... Just let me know and then I'll start listening again. Yeah, you can tune out for a minute when I'm getting to the fascinating stuff. I'll let you know. They're found from northern Mexico to northern Argentina. They're commonly found in trees, caves, mines, or wells. So, like, the typical places that you think you'd find a bat. They weigh less than two ounces on average and they're about four inches long.

They're grayish brown. As far as bats go, they're pretty unremarkable. They're not particularly big. They're not particularly small. They're kind of the color that you imagine when you imagined a bat. They live up to nine years in the wild. But really, I just think they're crazy interesting. One of the more interesting animals I've been able to research for the podcast.

They do feed on a variety of animals, everything from domestic cattle and horses to see lions and pelicans. Like there's really a wide range of stuff these guys will feed on. Wow. Their favorite victims, however, are horses, cattle, and pigs. The reason they like those animals so much is because they're relatively stationary at night. They don't really move around much. And they're also large enough that they're probably not even going to know that the bats feeding on them. They find their prey with really great eyesight.

They have also exceptional hearing. They use sonar like a lot of bats do. And then they have heat sensing pits in their nose flaps. Kind of like how we talked about rattlesnakes can sense heat. Bats can do that as well. Vampire bats can. Oh, cool. Yeah, and it is commonly thought that like bats are blind. They're not blind. These ones, vampire bats have really, really great eyesight. They find their prey with their eyesight, and then their sonar and everything else. And then they typically only fly when it's super dark outside. And so they really won't even fly when the moon is out. They wait until there's a moonless night or if the moon has already gone over the sky and is set, then they'll start flying. But they don't even like moonlight. Do their eyes work when it's like pitchers dark outside?

Yeah, yeah, they can see in the dark. Huh. So scientists think that they have really good memories so they can actually return to herds of livestock over and over and over again. And what they do, so Jeff, we're getting close to talking about how they feed. What? We're getting close to talking about how they feed, so you can check in. Yeah. A really cool thing about them is they often will land on the ground near the victims and then they run on all fours.

So they like, you know how bats sometimes have that long thumb that comes out of their tip of their wing and they have that little claw on it? Yeah. They have an extra long one and they bend their wing up. So it's like a leg and they run on the front of their legs and their back legs like on all fours. And they can run, jump and skip just like any other four-footed animal can. They're really, it's really impressive. They're really fast actually. How does that help them?

Like, you just think flying would be way better. Yeah. So the reason that helps is because if you fly into a cow or a horse or something and land on its back, it might notice you. It might feel you land on it. But if they can run along the ground and then bite their animal, then it's a little bit easier to go undetected. But they do have to be really careful when they're making that approach because often their victims are up to 10,000 times heavier than them. So them running up to an animal and biting it, you just have to think how brave that actually is. I was struck by how brave vampire bats are because they're actually biting these huge animals

that are so much bigger than them. Like, can you imagine running up to a dragon that's 10,000 times bigger than you and then biting it? So we'll finally get into what they actually do. And sometimes they will just fly and land on the back of whatever they're biting. The common misconception is that they're sucking blood out of their prey. And what they actually have is these really, as we mentioned, they have heat sensing organs and their nose. And they can actually detect where the blood is closest to the skin and the animal that

they're biting. So they can know where the best capillaries to bite are. And then what they do, it's crazy, they'll repeatedly lick a patch of skin. And they just lick it over and over and over again until it's clean and soft enough. And then they bite it really quick with these razor-sharp incisors. And what that does is it creates a really clean, really nice little cut that just starts bleeding and the bat starts licking it up. So they're not sucking.

And what's really crazy is the bat does this in and out motion with its tongue. And blood is flowing up the underside of the tongue on these specialized grooves. And then on the top side of the tongue, they have an anticoagulant that's flowing into the wound. So as they're licking up that blood, they're also stopping it from clotting. So it's pretty crazy. This anticoagulant is 20 times stronger than any other known anticoagulant. we can't make stuff that's that good at stopping blood from clotting. Doctors are actually researching it to try and figure out how to make something that works this well

because it would be really helpful when you're looking at like heart disease and strokes and all these other kind of issues, but we can't make something that works this well. That's so cool. Yeah, and as the best doing it, it'll actually like swirl its tongue around in the wound every once in while just to make sure enough of this anticoagulants getting in there. Oh, stop, bless. You're getting me hot. that keeps the blood flowing

and it makes it so the most important thing for the bat is that it makes it so this bat doesn't have to keep biting because the bite is really the thing that's like the scariest part for them if it bites and the animal figures out that it's there it's going to kill it or at least hurt it but if it can bite without being detected then it can just drink as much as it wants well and that's like why they go for cows probably too

is what's a cow going to do if you're on its butt biting it. Right. It's a lot harder for them to react. A monkey or a human or something could probably swat it away. They have expandable tube-like stomachs and they can consume their entire weight in blood during a single feeding. How much do they weigh? They weigh about two ounces. So two ounces of blood. That's quite a bit of blood. Like that's, that's a decent amount. Half of your body weight being a liquid inside your gut? Their entire body weight. They can consume their entire body weight. That's amazing. Oh, I see what you're saying. So they like double in size when they eat? And their feedings can last up to 30 minutes.

And then often they're replaced by other bats when they're finished feeding. So like a bat will feed for 30 minutes and then another bat from its colony will come out and start feeding. And sometimes they actually drink so much blood that they're unable to fly. So they run away again? I think they just so they also they have this really unique. Yeah, this is a tiny little bat rolling away. They have this really unique adaptation though. As they're feeding, they actually, their kidneys can filter out the urine and they pee while they're feeding.

and that helps them be able to filter out all that water so they're just getting the nutrients and not just the water from the blood. Man, animals are so cool. I know. Another really cool fact I learned, a colony of 100 vampire bats can drink the equivalent of 25 cows in a single year. So the blood from 25 cows in a single year. Whoa.

Pretty crazy. So they have a long history of when Columbus showed up here, he remarked on bats that fed on blood. and then Cortez's followers also told stories of bats that bit during the night. And then European colonists brought large numbers of livestock with them. And at that time, vampire bats were thought to be pretty rare, like pre-Columbian times. But now they've become much more common because they have this really great food source that we brought into their area, which is like cattle, livestock, and sometimes even ourselves.

They, because they have become so common, they'll almost always feed on livestock. and they just make these little cuts. But if you have multiple bats coming in on a single animal throughout the night, they can drain enough blood that that animal is going to be weaker in the morning and it's more susceptible to other diseases. And then also those cuts that they make are really easily infected and they're a good place for parasites and stuff to get into the wound. So they actually are a pretty huge agricultural pest

and they cost ranchers millions and millions of dollars. I read this little anecdote about there, There was an entire herd of goats in Trinidad and Tobago that got wiped out by vampire bats because they were feeding on them so much that they all got sick and died. Jeez. So it's pretty crazy. And then a big part of today's podcast, we're going to talk about one particular disease that they pass on, which you can probably guess what it is, but we're not going to get into

it quite yet because I have a few more pat facts. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items. then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery during online deal days, plus $30 off your first online order.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone. They're incredibly social. They sleep in roost with multiple females and typically one male. the female offspring will sometimes remain with their mothers throughout maturity, so even when they grow up, they stay with their mothers. Babies are capable of flight at 10 weeks, but they continue to suckle for about nine or 10 months. One of the coolest things about them, so this is one last really neat fact. They can't, as I mentioned, they can't survive for more than two days without food, and often up to 30% of bats in a colony won't be able to find food on any given night. So they

have a really unique strategy, something that hardly ever happens in the wild, which is that they're altruistic. So altruism just means you're helping something else, even though it's not giving you any benefit to yourself. So a bat that hasn't fed and needs to be fed will actually lick the faces of other bats in their colony in an attempt to get them to regurgitate their blood back into their mouth. And if the other bat is willing, it pukes blood into the other bat's mouth. So it's kind of gross and like pretty hardcore when you think about little bats flying around and puking blood into each other's mouths. It's nice to know that pure altruism does exist out there though. Yeah, it's really rare. Very, very few animals in the natural world show this kind

of altruism. They think it's evolved in bats because it's reciprocal and they just kind of have this inherent understanding that they may be the feeder that night, but later on they might be the beggar. And so they just know like, hey, if I feed this bat now, maybe someday I'll get fed when I need it, which is pretty cool. It made me really love vampire bats, to be honest. Okay, I had mentioned before that there's one disease that they can pass on to livestock or to whatever they might be biting that's especially destructive. Can you guys? Rabies. It's rabies.

Good guess. Good job. All right. It's a huge problem, especially in bats. A lot of rabies infections in the world are coming from bats, cats, or dogs. Those are like really the main three things that pass rabies on the people. Yep, the big three. But bats, it's pretty common as far as rabies goes.

I think it's really important that we understand how rabies works. So I actually looked up another story that isn't vampire bat related. It is bat related about rabies to kind of explain how it works. So if you guys don't mind, we're going to take a little diversion away from vampire bats to talk about rabies. Are you guys okay with that? Yeah. I'm pretty into bats right now, you know. Okay, cool. Friggin' bats, right? You guys ever seen that video? Halloween, friggin' bats. We'll play it. Frickin bats. I love Halloween. Okay, so I actually first heard this story on Radio Lab, which is a podcast I really love. And this episode where they talked about this

story came out, I think in like 2013. I heard it forever ago. So I looked it back up, found a few more articles about it. It's really interesting and it kind of changed the whole way that we look at rabies. I'll go ahead and just tell it to you. In 2004, Gianna Geis is at Mass with her family and she's in a large Catholic church in Fondulac, Wisconsin. So during Mass, this bat starts swooping around. It's landing behind the altar. It's getting close to people's head. They're in this big cathedral type church. And this bat's being really annoying. So everyone's kind of getting like distracted by this bat that's swooping around and suddenly one of the ushers hits the bat to the floor, which makes me think of when Manu Genoblee did that during a game.

It's so cool, Mike. Mike hates Manu Ginoble. He ruined basketball. He won't even give him credit for like hitting a bat out of the air when the workers couldn't even get it. You don't even say that, admit that that was cool. It's not that cool. That happens every day.

It did. It happened in this case. Anyway, the usher hits the bat to the floor and it's kind of just laying there. But Gianna, who's our main person in this story, she's 15 at the time. She's an animal lover and she grabs the bat by the wings, takes it out to release it. So she's a sophomore in high school. She's there with their family. She takes this bat outside to release it.

And as she's releasing it, it actually bites her on the finger. Bats are like any kind of small rodent. If you pick one up, there's a pretty good chance it's going to try and bite you. So she doesn't think much of the bite. and she goes back inside to sit down with her family. So we're going to fast forward about a month, and Gianna starts feeling really shitty. She has like tingling in her arm.

She thinks it might just be a pinch nerve because she plays volleyball and she's pretty athletic, but she's also having double vision, and not much longer she develops some pretty severe flu-like symptoms. So she goes to see a doctor who tells her it's not the flu, but he's not really sure what she has. So he's just like, you know, go home and rest, drink lots of fluids, kind of typical stuff.

So she goes back home, it gets a lot worse. And on top of that, she starts to have involuntary jerking, and she's seizing up when she goes to the bathroom and just seizing up in general. And her speech also starts to become slurred. So her parents decide to rush her to a neurologist because they think it's probably something with their brain. So they run a bunch of tests. They test for like meningitis, encephalitis, all these different neurological diseases, and they all come back negative. So the neurologists are kind of stumped, but they decide to host. hospitalize her. So a day or two later, her pediatrician comes to talk to her and is pretty concerned

by how much worse it seems like she's gotten. And as this pediatrician's talking to her parents, somehow this story about the bat comes up. And when they tell him about the bat, his face goes white and he says, I got to go and he runs out of the room. So then they transfer her. Diarrhea. Yeah. They actually send her to see an infectious disease specialist in Milwaukee. Diary. Dr. Rodney Willoughby. That's so funny. By the time they see Dr. Willoughby,

Gianna can hardly move or speak. She's confined to a wheelchair, can hardly say anything. Things are deteriorating rapidly. Oh, man. So he realizes right away, he's like, she's got rabies. He tells her parents, he knows about the bat. He says she has rabies,

and she's almost certainly going to die from the virus. So rabies has almost a 100% fatality rate once symptoms are present. Once you're starting to show those kind of symptoms, you're screwed. So a little bit about rabies and how it works. A lot of viruses, wherever the site of the virus entering the body is,

the virus is going to replicate there really quickly, and then it's going to get into your bloodstream, and it's going to replicate in your bloodstream, and it's going to spread all over your body, and that's kind of how it works. Rabies is very different. What rabies does is it simply grabs onto a nerve at the infection site,

and it just follows that nerve up into your brain. And it just grabs that nerve and moves hand over hand on your nerve until it gets to your brain. And that can take weeks or even months for it to make that trip, especially if it's going all the way from like the bottom of your body. If it's going from like a foot or a leg or something, it's going to be just slowly moving up your body. Weird. So then once it actually gets to your brain, it starts attacking your brain.

So the whole time that it's traveling from wherever you were bitten or whatever, you can administer a vaccine and that vaccine will do its job. Once it gets to your brain, you're screwed. It's too late. This Dr. Willoughby starts doing tons of research. He's calling like the CDC. He's reading case reports. And it all seems really hopeless.

Like everything says once you've got symptoms, it's over. You're done. So she had small symptoms like her arm was tingly and stuff. But that's right when it started working on her brain. Because that was like a month after she got bitten. And it takes time for your symptoms to get worse and worse. and we're going to talk about that in just a second. So this Dr. Willoughby, he had learned that lots of rabies researchers kind of disagreed on what it actually does to your brain.

But what a lot of them believed is that it's not actually destroying your brain, but it's causing your neurons to be overstimulated. So rather than like it doing actual damage to the brain, it's just damaging the way that your brain works. And so all these neurons are firing all crazy and the brain can't do the stuff that it's typically doing, which is like taking care of your body, because it's so focused on all this other stuff the virus is making it do. So it's not actually destroying the tissue. It's just making your brain do crazy stuff. Because it's not taking care of your body anymore,

all these things start going wrong. Like you start having twitching and slurred speech and all sorts of weird stuff because your brain is no longer in control. So a crazy thing is like when people die of rabies, they'll cut open their brain and everything looks fine and there's no rabies in there anymore. And it's because it's not actually hurt.

hurting the brain. It's just making it act weird. It's like a little alien in there is just messing with all your controls. Yeah. Like a little toddler with the remote control just hitting all the buttons. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like. That's great. Good job, Jeff. Yeah. No, I completely agree with you. I think that's actually really good. Jeff gets a raise. So this Dr. Willoughby, who's been doing all this research, comes up with an idea. and what he decides is he thinks like, okay, so the reason that we can't fight this rabies virus is because our immune system could actually do it, but by the time the rabies virus is attacking the

brain, it's too late, it's like goes way too quick. And so the immune system doesn't even realize anything's wrong until it's too late. What he decides is if I can just give the immune system a little bit longer to mount an attack, then it could probably destroy the virus before it kills Gianna. So what he decides to do is put her into a coma. And when she's in the coma, these people in the hospital can help her body do the basic things it needs to do to survive beyond a ventilator and all that kind of stuff. But that way, he'll have time to give her immune system time to attack the virus. But the big risk is that because she has a virus attacking her brain and she's already in a weakened state that she won't come out of this coma and she'll be vegetative for the

rest of her life. So it's a pretty big risk. But the family decides to go ahead with it and they put her into this coma. They start to see her immune system mounting a response. They start to see that she has these antibodies and stuff's working. And then things start to get better and better. So they're like, let's wake her up and see if it worked. And they go to wake her up and she won't wake up. So they're kind of freaking out. They're like, oh, shoot, our worst case scenario is happening. She's going to be vegetative. And then suddenly one day a doctor's in there testing her anything. sees that she has a reflex, which she didn't have before. And so they rush in there. And then soon she starts to flutter her eyes and like follow light with her eyes. And then she slowly comes out

of this coma and she's okay. And the rabies is gone. So it works. She had to like relearn everything. She had to relearn how to walk. She had to relearn a lot of stuff. She still can't fully run the way she used to. She still has some occasional like problems with her brain. But she's alive. And they call this treatment the Milwaukee Protocol. We're going to take a quick... It's like the Manhattan Project just a little less cool. The Milwaukee Protocol. A quick thing about this.

So there's like a Brazilian different one called the Hesife Protocol where they do a few things differently. They've used this now like 38, 40 times. No one's ever had the same results as Gianna. Oh, wow. That guess good of results? I think 11 people survived, but they all survived with some pretty crazy and serious. side effects. And we are going to actually talk about one more of those stories with vampire bats in a little bit. But I wanted to tell that story because I think it really illustrates pretty

well how rabies actually works. And I think it really teaches you, if you get bit by an animal that you think there's even the chance that it's rabid, go get the vaccination. Because as soon as those symptoms set in, you're probably screwed. Yeah, it's making me try. I don't think I've gotten bitten by anything in the past six months, but like, yeah. Maybe I should go just in case. You can get a rabies vaccine at any time. They are expensive, though. So then if you get the rabies vaccine, you can get bit by a rabid animal and it won't do anything?

Yeah. Like any bat researcher has to have rabies vaccine because they work with bats. That makes sense. I just don't know about vaccines in general. You know? I've been listening to a lot of Kyrie Irving. Oh, yeah. I'm sure you have.

No, just kidding. If you are not COVID vaccinated, you should get it. You should reconsider because even if it's not going to affect you, it will affect other people. Yeah, yeah. And it'll spread. Okay, so a couple other crazy things about rabies. When you have rabies, like a human being has rabies, they start to salivate a lot, and so do animals and stuff. Like, that's why there's that foaming at the mouth.

and you have a fear of water too. So even though you really want to drink water because you're oversalivating and all these things, but you're so afraid of it that you won't. And rabies does that to you because if you have a ton of saliva in your mouth, if you bite someone else, you're going to give them rabies. That saliva is loaded with rabies. And so that's rabies trying to pass itself on to other animals.

That's also why animals get really aggressive. it makes you get aggressive because it knows, hey, if I can make this animal bite 30 other animals, then I'm passing myself on to other animals and I'm spreading this virus. So it does like some wild things to make you pass it on. So it's in your nerves, but then like how is it in your saliva too? It's in your brain. And once it gets in your brain, that's when it starts to replicate and go crazy. And that's when it starts to like go through your whole body.

So that's like, again, once you have symptoms, that's, That's when it's going full force. So have humans bit other humans in Paston rabies? Oh, yeah, for sure. It's probably where, like, werewolf stories and stuff come from. It probably is. Some hairy, big old guy bit some... Like that Beavis and Butthead clip, they think he's a werewolf.

Yeah. And they pay him to bite them because they want to be werewolves. Oh, it's so funny. It's crazy. And if any of you out there are especially morbid, I know there are a handful of you that are, you can look up, I did this, I kind of almost regret it. There's a bunch of old videos of medical tests where people had rabies and they just let them run the full course of it and they film the entire thing. And it's crazy what happens to people.

They start screaming and going completely insane. It's wild. So you can find those online if you want to. I'm not going to share them on here. But rabies is a gnarly disease. It's not one that you want to get. Yeah. If I ever get it, you guys, you have to promise me you'll be.

put me down. We'll take you out behind the shed, just like old yellow. Silver bullet to the brain. Thank you. Just in case you're a wearable. We might do it. We might just do it anyways, just in case you have rabies already. That's, you can't be too safe. I understand. All right. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates

who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Bats with rabies do typically die,

but they can give it to their prey before they die. So vampire bats, when they're out flying around and looking for prey, if they can't find their preferred prey of cattle, horses, or pigs, they'll sometimes turn to humans. And especially rabid vampire bats will because they're much more aggressive, much bolder than they typically would be. So they might be willing to fly into a house or into a tent or into one of these places where humans are where there might be a little bit more light and stuff that they would typically be more nervous about. They're not really thinking straight. So they're going to go in there.

So people sleeping outside or people like sleeping in places that don't with windows that don't have screens on them or something are much more likely to be bit. And a really crazy thing about vampire bites on humans, vampire bat fights on humans, is where do you guys think they probably bite us? I'm going to say like around the head area. So it's somewhere pretty unexpected. It's your big toe. They typically bite people on their big toe. I don't know if it's just because there's capillaries really close to the surface there or what, but that's the place where they typically bite us.

So people living in rural communities in the Amazon Basin are commonly bit by vampire bats. Like this is a pretty common thing in those places. When they've done surveys in Amazon Basin, they've found that almost half of the surveyed individuals report having been bit by vampire bats at one point or another. However, cases of rabies are pretty rare, but when they happen, it typically happens in like an outbreak. And these outbreaks are pretty common in children, and that's because children tend to sleep a little deeper than adults,

and so like the bat can bite them without being noticed. So children are a little bit more susceptible to vampire bite bats. Vampire bat bites. Vampire bites, got it. The toe makes sense because the bats are probably running up to us. I mean, we're not any different than a cow to them. They probably want to sneak up on the ground and get us the toe, right? Yeah, but I think it usually is when people are sleeping so they're horizontal,

and so the bat will land on their bed and then hop up to their foot. But I think you're right. I think they're trying to stay away from our head and trying to stay away from like where we might see them. So the big toe makes sense. So in 2005, 23 people died in Brazil during a rabies outbreak that was probably caused because a regional generator died and it left people without electricity. So there's all these bats that were just like, all right, there's no light anymore. We're flying in there. We're biting these people. Oh, interesting.

And that... So, ravies doesn't affect the bats? It does. They'll die with rabies. But they'll typically bite... They'll still feed until they die. So of all the bats that get rabies, very few of them are actually going to pass it on

because they just end up dying, but some of them will. Yeah. So 18 of these 23 people that died in this 2005 outbreak were children. And then in 2016, 12 children died in a native village in the Peruvian. Amazon. And when that, when that outbreak first occurred, the villagers blamed witchcraft. And so they actually didn't report the outbreak until it was too late. Because you have all these like kids foaming at

the mouth and jerking and doing all this weird stuff. So they thought it was witchcraft. And so by the time they reported it, it had already like kind of run its course. But health care workers came in and vaccinated everyone else. Okay, I got a couple more little stories. Because in 2017, there was another outbreak in the state of Bayea in Brazil, and 40 people were treated for rabies, and one person died. And we're going to tell his story really quick. The man who died was Eji Valson Francisco Sosa, and he was milking a cow on his farm in Paramiram Bayea,

and it's like a task that this guy's done thousands of times before, but this night was going to be really different. So Zosa's out milking his cow, and he didn't realize that he had company, but that company was a common vampire. bat, and it had begun its approach to this cow with the intent to bite the cow and, you know, lick the blood and feed on it. But it didn't expect to share the cow with Sosa and probably froze when he came in and started milking the cow. So he's, at this point, he's probably pretty

lucky because this bat was about to start feeding on his cow. He gets in there before it. But then his luck turns because as he's walking out, he actually steps on the vampire bat. And when he steps on it. I'm assuming he's barefoot, it bites him on his foot. And he doesn't even realize that this has happened. So he steps on his bat, it bites him, he doesn't even notice. Really? Yeah. So weeks later, Sosa starts having headaches, nausea, severe anxiety and shortness of breath, and he knows something's really wrong. He goes to the hospital, they tell him that he has rabies. They actually figure out that he had been bitten by a vampire bat. They see where he'd been bitten. And it's too late for him to receive the vaccine and he dies later in the hospital. When this happens,

a rabies alert goes out to the surrounding areas. His death is featured on the news. Matheos Andradez was living in nearby Salvador, Brazil. He knows this is happening. He knows rabies is kind of in his area. And one morning he wakes up and he thinks there's probably a leak in his roof because he can feel all these wet spots on his bed. And he pulls the sheets back on his bed and he realizes to his horror that all these damp spots on his bed are his own blood and that he had been fed on all night by multiple vampire bats. Oh, my goodness. And this guy lives in like downtown Salvador.

So this is like a big Brazilian city. He lives downtown and vampire bats are coming to his house. He hadn't actually felt the bites or the bite, but he had dreamed about something being hooked on his toe. So he actually immediately goes to the hospital and he gets the rabies vaccine. So that was 2017. One last story. In 2017 again, there was a boy named Mateus De Silva,

and he and his siblings were all bitten by vampire bats. His siblings, Lucas, who was 17, and Maria, who's 10, both died of rabies. Mateus also got rabies, but his dad, they all lived in the same house. His dad knew they had been bit by vampire bats, but he said that he had been bitten hundreds of times in his life, so he just didn't think it was a big deal. And then when like these kids start dying, he took Mateus to the hospital and they did this Milwaukee protocol in Mateus. And when I read all these news articles, it was all like teen is fifth person to ever survive rabies using Milwaukee protocol. I was like, oh, great.

And then I found this article from 2021 this year. And he's vegetative. Oh, no. Can only follow stuff with his eyes. He's in a coma. And I think initially he was in pretty good shape when he survived, but then he like regressed. and now he's pretty much in a coma. He's back in the hospital.

His parents, they're still happy he's alive, but they had to move. They have to live nearby because he can't really do anything anymore. I don't know. I think I'd rather just go. Take me out behind the shed. Yeah.

Stake to the heart. I can't believe that one guy who's walked on one and didn't notice. I know. Because if I like walk on like the smallest pebble, it hurts so bad. Yeah. And I can't imagine, like, walking on a bat that, like, bites me and not feeling.

It probably squeaked and tried to fly away and stuff. Like, I'm sure he just had a lot more callous feet. Yeah, like, you're not a Brazilian farmer. But a cool thing. One last thing I just-surface, like, people's feet are so much better than mine. Right. But that also, if he was that callous, the virus would have still gone into his body? I don't know.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they said the bite was. Still in his foot. Yeah, I mean, it must have been for them to know that it bit him. One last thing, Mike, that you just made me think of that's really cool about vampire bats. Most bats have to be, they have to be climbing something to, like, take off and fly. They have to be vertical. But vampire bats can actually take off from the ground, and they stand up straight and then jump

into the air and spread their wings and fly off. That's kind of cool. It's pretty cool. Like, there's some cool videos of them doing it. I've read some really horrifying accounts of people suffering. through rabies and just how hard it is to even express how strong the paranoia and anxiety is. It's like amplified a hundredfold of the most scared and paranoid you have ever been about anything. Like your brain is, again, like we said, it's just malfunctioning.

And these people are just scared and paranoid and sweating and dying. And they have no idea why or what to do. Crazy. Yeah, it sounds bad. I don't want it. Yeah. I'd like to experience it once. I don't think you do.

Try anything once. Yeah, I'm definitely going to get my vaccine before I do my next season in Yellowstone because every once in a while there are animals there that have it. All right. Well, do you guys have any questions about vampire bats or about the stories or rabies or anything? No, I think I asked them as we went. Okay. So let's go ahead and move on to our categories if you guys don't have any questions.

Categories. Oh, should we do the ouchies? Oh, yeah, let's do outchies. I forgot. So we'll do outchies for, I guess, I guess let's just do outchies for if you're bitten by a vampire bat and it gives you rabies. Initial outchie would be like a one, but after the rabies start, it's a 10, I think. I'm the exact same.

It's a one for the bite. It's a 10 for the outcome. I'm going to give it a 9. For the outcome? Yeah. Just overall. Okay. There's just no like dismemberment or anything like that or it's like not that bloody, but I know it's super pain.

Like it seems like you get it mental and physical, so that sucks. But yeah, I'm taking it down one step just because there's no visual physical pain. Yeah, the mental stuff is what makes it attend for me. Me too. Not being able to control your own body and feeling like you're going crazy is the worst for me. I think the initial bite might even be like a negative outy. It sounds kind of pleasant having a little bat, lickier toe, and then nibble it. Some people are really into that.

So negative one. People into that should be tested for rabies. I was worried just like kissing girls if they bite me now. I'm going to be like, hold on. Don't kiss girls who are foaming at the mouth. That's another PSA for you. Or boys. Man, those are the ones that seem to like me.

The ones that are foaming in the mouth. The rabid ones who have no sense of reality or self or confidence. All right. Well, let's move on to our categories if you guys were ready. So our first category, I asked you guys what your favorite bat from popular culture is. So, Mike, what's your favorite bat? So Well, kind of.

First of all, you didn't. Yes, I did. In the text, I can show you, you asked us what our favorite bar. I thought bar was a weird thing. Oh, shit. You said, what's your favorite bar and your favorite vampire? Oh. Yeah, I thought one of your stories was going to include a bar somehow.

So you guys didn't prepare our favorite bad? You just have your favorite bars? Yeah. Yeah. I got some good bars. All right. I guess tell me what your favorite bar is, and then I'll tell you guys what my favorite bat is.

All right. Well, I have Moes Tavern in The Simpsons. Okay. And then in the last Pierce Brosman in 007, James Bond. Yeah. He goes to like an ice palace with a like ice bar. Oh, dude.

And that bar always looks so cool to me. Like die another day is that what's called? Yeah. Those exist. Those always seemed miserable to me. Like, you'd just be freezing as you're sitting in the bar. Ice bars look so cool to me. Yeah, but you like ice powers too.

So you love all that shit. Mike. I just rewatched Casablanca. So Rick's Cafe American, I just think is the coolest little bar with Sam playing the piano for everyone. But honorable mention goes to the bar in Twin Peaks. A lot of crazy important. stuff happens in that bar. So I don't know. I just laughing to myself that we're doing bars when I totally thought we could be doing bats. Well, I did bats. Okay, good. My favorite bat is the

bat from Great Mouse Detective, Fidget. He's like kind of a henchman for the bad guy in Great Mouse Detective. And I just remember there's a season where like, a season. There's a scene where there's like a flash of lightning and he's looking through the window and his teeth are all bared and I saw that as a kid and it really scared me but he's actually like kind of a fun little character so I did bats do you guys have any bats that you could think off the top of your head yeah my favorite bats the bat and gremlin too like the gremlin that turns into a bat i really like the bat that genobley hit too and sanai that poor bat Mike can you think of a favorite bat i actually can so anyone that's read the children's book stella luna do you guys ever read

that one you're little no but that one i i've been at least heard of. It's great. And the fern golly. What's the fern golly bat? I think it's, isn't it just like batty? I don't know. I can't remember.

The one that isn't Robin Williams the voice for that one? Yeah. I don't know. I guess that's a fake one. I don't know enough to say that's my favorite. But I'm just pose. I'm a fern goie poser. I'll go Estella Luna.

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Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. And then I also asked you guys to come up with your favorite vampire. I'll go first on that one. So the late 90s or mid-90s, Bram Stoker's Dracula movie, the Gary Oldman's Dracula in that movie, That's my favorite vampire. He's so good in that movie. It's such a weird, horny movie,

but I watch it every Halloween. I just absolutely love it. And I think he's like the best Dracula ever on screen. So that's my favorite. I got to watch that. The set design in that movie is incredible. It's unreal. It's the best I've ever seen.

It's a big movie. But that trailer scared the hell out of me when it came out when I was a kid. And then I watched it as an adult. I'm just like this movie's so weird and like silly, but it's also so good. And Keanu Reeves has the worst accent ever in that movie. Incredible stuff. It's good. You guys need to watch that movie. Mike, go for it.

Oh, man, I had such a hard time. I might pull a Jeff and just throw out a couple of honorable mentions. Wait till I go, though. Okay, so I'll say my favorite one at this moment, if I'm gunned to the head, forced to pick. I just watched interview with a vampire. Speaking of mid-90s movies Tom Cruise Tom Cruise right

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt movie Horny vampire movies Oh the most homo erotic movie I love Tom Cruise So much is Lestat He overacts It's like I don't even know if it's called Overact

You can call it overacting But he just dials it up so hard And he's so good in it Man it was such a fun I've actually never seen it I need to watch it It's fun Cool

Mine was pretty easy. I'm going Salma Hayek and Dust Tell Don. That is a good pick. I don't really know why I like her in that. I can't put a finger on it, but I just really liked her in that role.

There's a lot of people that are confused that have never seen that. She's like my all-time Hollywood crush. Yeah. Yeah, I can think of a few reasons why you would like that one. What are your honorable men? So I had Blade.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. I just watched that last week. I love that movie. Spike from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Oh, also a great pick. And, oh, man, the Count, Von Count, from Sesame Street. And Dio from Jojo's Bazaar Adventure.

Man, I might, Spike might be out, Gary Oldman for me. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's like one of my all-time favorite shows. I didn't even think of him. Okay. We'd love to hear what the rest of y'all's favorite vampires are, so feel free to send us a message and let us know. another question I had for you guys based on this episode.

It's kind of a special category, special episode, Halloween. If you're in bed and you pull back the covers and there's some creepy crawly in your bed, what's the worst possible thing for you guys to see in there with you? Like if you're, if there's one animal you don't want to see in the bed with you, what is it, Jeff? For me, it's like a viper or like some type of snake. Poisonous snake? That would scare me the most.

Honestly, though, this episode, like vampire bats are ugly. Yeah, they are kind of ugly. And they're pretty creepy that they only drink blood. So that's like climbed the list pretty high for me. Okay. Mike? So I guess I thought about this maybe a little wrong,

but I thought you were going to ask us what animal we would least want to sleep with. Not like in a sexual way at all. Yeah. But I was thinking probably one of those like huge electric eels. Oh, that's good. Because they're like, they're wet and sleeping in a wet bed sucks, and they'll, like, shock you. And they're just kind of gross. I just feel like I'd be so, I'd be more confused and scared when I saw an electric eel in my bed, though.

Like, what asshole does put an electric eel in my bed? For me, I think my answer are one of those really big centipedes that they have, like, in the jungle. Oh, yeah. I don't like centipedes. I don't want a centipede in my bed. That's, that's probably my answer. Too many legs. Although our Funnel Web episode kind of put Sydney Funnel Web's pretty high up there for me on Critters.

I don't want in my bed too. So that's our, that category. I think we're going to skip our cage match because this is going to be probably pretty low. I think it's really only beating the spider and that's about it. I think everything else is going to beat it. I think it beats the spider. Maybe not though, actually. It'll give it radius.

The spider could get it in its web. Yeah, this could actually be a pretty good fight for the spider. So maybe we should do the cage match. Yeah, well, we did. We just did. Yeah, there you go. The spider and the bat are going to have a pretty good fight. Okay, Jeff, do you have any listener questions for us?

Oh, I sure do, bud. Oh, good. Thanks, pal. Okay, so this one's from Travis S. Durand. What does it bears fur feel like? Do you want to answer? Sure. It's not soft just because they...

A cub is pretty soft because they really haven't, like, been in the wild yet. But like bears, they get a lot of hair. And since they're like always going through bushes and trees, it gets like pretty clumped up. So just like a dog that you've never bathed that have a lot of hair or something. But they kind of have like an undercoat that's softer. And then they have like some more coarse hair on top. Yeah, they can have, you can find a soft bear.

Yeah. I think the animal that most people are aware of is like like a bigger dog, like a like a St. Bernard or like a Malamute or one of those dogs have similar hair to a bear, but it's a little bit different still. They just have like some soft hair and some coarse hair. If you washed a bear with shampoo and conditioner, would they floof up pretty well? I think they would. They get pretty floofy.

Well, like the grizzly bears that are like people's pets always seem so much softer too. And like puffier. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're like cleaned. And then we have some patron questions. Patrons, the spooky special edition, they're going to be extra spooky questions, right? Yes, they're very spooky.

So this is from Lewis, and he says, so this, he's been keeping track of all my animal rankings for it. Oh, this is the guy. Super helpful, thanks Lewis. And he says, what animal would each of you choose to perform surgery on you and why? That is spooky. Probably one with an opposable. Yeah, one with a thumb, I would say. What's that weird monkey that looks kind of like Adrian Brody?

Like, disconcertingly human-looking monkey? I'd pick that one. Okay. What's it called? Let me look it up. I'll figure it out while you answer. Is it a proboscis monkey? No, not with the big nose.

It's a... Okay. I'm looking it up. Yeah, I would want some kind of primate. I'm going like... I'm going to say like a human-sized spider with like human intelligence. With all the legs. Yeah, it's got eight legs, so then you can grab all the stuff that the nurses would have to get, and they can't make any mistakes.

And then it could use its webbing to, like, stitch me back up. Okay, that's a good pick. That's a good, yeah. I like that. You broke some rules, I feel. Unwritten rules, of course. I mean, any animal, you've got to assume they have human intelligence, or that's none of them will be a good answer. That is my fault for not assuming.

Well, maybe it's just a bad question. The next of the question, yeah. I liked it. Okay, and then from NISTI, so basically, she's just wanting to know if she can car camp with food in the car or if bears can, like, smell food through a locked car. Yeah, it really depends on where you are. Like in Yellowstone, yeah, you could. Our bears in Yellowstone haven't really keyed into that cars are potential sources of food.

In Yosemite, they have had problems with cars being broken into by bears, and there's some other places in the country where that's happened. So you can, but if you're in a place that's like particularly berry, there's lots of bears around, I would bring like a cooler and keep your food in your cooler in your car, and you'll be fine. Is that something you say to each other up in Yellowstone? Oh, it's berry out there today. We do say that actually quite a bit. That's funny. This one's from milady Melady

Yep So it's a long question So Malady I'm going to just kind of shorten it up But basically she's saying that she heard that you don't eat seafood for like Environmental reasons Yeah And she doesn't eat beef for environmental reasons And she just wants to know how much of an impact it has to cut out

meat and or dairy. You know what? There's like 30 documentaries on Netflix that could explain this better than I can. I know that agriculture has a huge effect on climate change and that ranching is really like not only the forest destruction to like make room for those animals, but also the like methane gas and everything that they produce. The meat industry is really, really, really, really bad for the planet. So I think if you can, if you can either source meat from like,

really ethical places where they are doing like restorative grazing and all these different things, great. Then you can eat meat in an ethical way. If you can't, then I think, I think in 2021, we all kind of have to pick our battles and decide like what you can, how many different issues you can take on at once. For me, seafood was a really big one because it's a wild animal that we're pulling out of the oceans and we're completely destroying like fish stocks throughout the world. so that was like because I care a lot about conservation that's a really one that was like close to my heart but the beef one's a really important one too and I think kudos to you milady for going in there and like and deciding not to do it my side of things I like to just try and get beef from somewhere where I know

they're doing it right okay cool so our next category will be how are we messing things up for vampire bats So vampire bats because they do bite people and because they do bite livestock, there have been some pretty coordinated efforts to get rid of them. As we mentioned, like us bringing livestock closer to vampire bats has helped their populations grow unchecked. There's many, many more vampire bats than there would be in a natural setting. So they actually have done coordinated efforts to try and get rid of some vampire bats. And that's okay because there are way more than we need. On the other hand, when they do that often they'll go to caves and whatever and like blow them up or spray pesticides on them or do all these terrible things to get rid of vampire bats and when they're doing that they're also killing

bats that eat insects and bats that are pollinators and bats that do all these incredible things for the ecosystems that they live in and so it's really really bad because they're killing all these other bats and then as i mentioned bats vampire bats there's a lot that we can learn from them like that anticoagulant in their saliva there's some really cool things that we can it from vampire bats, plus they're such an amazing animal, I think. So I do think it's okay for us to try and control their numbers. I don't think people should panic when there's vampire bats around and be like, we got to get rid of all of them. So really, I guess the main way that things are being messed up for them are these kind of retaliatory attacks when vampire bats come in and hurt someone

or give some rabies or something. And those aren't completely bad. Sometimes their populations do need to be decreased a little bit in these areas. But you can't blame an animal for feeding on a really great food source that you introduce to it. That's not their fault. And they're a really cool animal. All these facts that we've learned about them has really pushed them up on my list of how cool I think they are.

So we might as well do that next. Yeah, let's do that. Let's give them our claw ratings. I'm going to give them an eight out of ten for vampire bats. I give them eight claws. I'm going to give them a three. Okay. You want to explain?

Oh, yeah. I like bats, and, like, I think they get a bad rep, and I think it's because of bats, like, vampire bats that are really ugly and bite people. But most bats are, like, super cute, and people don't realize, like, how cute bats can be. I think vampire bats are kind of cute, too. I think they're ugly.

Google Image Vampire bats. Oh, I've looked at thousands of pictures of them this week. I'm looking it up right now. Yeah, I guess I should explain why I give them eight. I just, I think they're like, the fact that they only feed on blood, that they are altruistic, that they can, like, shoot themselves up in the air and fly from, like, standing, that they can run on all four legs. I just think they're so cool. And, like, all the videos on watch this week.

Yeah. And I think you're really cool. I'd give you at least eight claws. That's Mike. What would you give vampire bats? I'm looking at pictures of bats right now, Jeff. They kind of look like little fuzzy orcs. I think they look cool.

Maybe not cute, but I think they look pretty cool. I'm giving them eight to all those facts that Wes shared at the beginning of the episode. Like you said, I am walking away from this episode thinking they're cooler than I thought they were even before. So at least eight. I think eight's probably where I settle. Eight felt a little conservative to me too, but eight was what I settled on. I'm putting them at 921. Whoa.

On my overall. That's low. I just like most bats more than these bats, I think. What about bars? Do you like bars? Ice bars. That was a simple typo. I can't believe neither of you text me and be like, your favorite bar?

Are you serious? I kind of thought it sounded fun to talk about a bar from pop culture. Fair enough, I guess. Do you have a favorite bar? What? Do I have a favorite bar? Yeah. I mean, if it's from pop culture, it's definitely Moes, without a doubt.

It could have been any kind of bar. It could have been like chocolate bar. What in the favorite chocolate bar? Fair enough. Bar for music. I was thinking of the bar Homer uses to close the space shuttle door. Oh, the rod. The rod.

The rod. All right. Well, that's it for Vampire Bats. I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Honestly, like, sometimes the research on these can be a little tedious. This one was really fun for me. And I've been talking to everyone about vampire bats all week at work because I've just been so fascinated by them and I can't stop thinking about them.

Part of it's probably because it's October and I just love spooky October things. But I also just think they're such a cool animal. So I hope you guys liked it. I loved it. Great. And then a quick announcement. We are going to have a special Patreon Halloween episode next week as well. I'm probably going to tell a story from that everyone's really tired of hearing probably,

but it's a really scary story that happened to me while I was doing field. fieldwork that I actually got a photo of. Not the cabin. Is it the cabin? It's not the cabin less. But I'm going to tell all the details. I've never said everything. We've never said it on the podcast.

I'm going to tell the cabin story. And then we probably got a couple other fun surprises that are going to be in that Patreon episode. And we're going to release the long awaited animal death episode that I did a while back. Exactly. Which is our most. morbid episode we've ever done and we think it's fitting to release it right before Halloween. So you Patreon members are getting some special perks next week.

So if you haven't signed up yet, sign up for Patreon. And happy Halloween, everyone. Happy Spookaween. Have a spooktacular Halloween. We hope you have some fun out there with your gremlins and ghouls. You're scaring little kids. Yeah. All right.

Love you guys. Bye. Bye. Hey, everyone. Looks like you did it again. You made it to the end of another one of our episodes. There's another bullet point for the old resume. So it's that time again. We want to go through each of our new patrons and thank them personally for subscribing to us over there. We really hope that all you new subscribers are really enjoying

what we do over there. We do put a lot of effort into the extra and bonus content that we post there, and hope that those of you who have gotten your merchandise already are liking that. Again, we're all kind of jealous, me, Jeff and Wes that you guys get the those sweet tooth and claw stickers because Patreon is the only place that you can get those. So literally the only way we can get our own merchandise at this point is to subscribe to ourselves on Patreon. So those perks are maybe even more exclusive than you thought before. But anyways, I'm getting sidetracked.

I always do. I'm actually in a really good mood right now. It's cloudy, it's been raining all week, and for some reason I'm weird like that, it just puts me in a really, really happy place. So I hope you guys are wherever you are enjoying and love in life. Because you deserve it. Wow, that's amazing. I just said I was getting too sidetracked and then immediately got sidetracked again.

All right, let's do this. We're going to thank each of the new patrons by name. So let's start with, of course, Jan Jan. And pardon me if I mess up your names. There are a couple in here. One even forewarned us that we're probably going to pronounce his or her name wrong. So with that out of the way, let's start over again. All right, Jan Jan. Thank you. Brooke, Laura, Yu-Fong, Victoria, Bonnie, Mility?

So, Mility, we pronounced your name as Malady in the episode. So I'm just going to go the other way. Maybe one of the two ways we pronounce it here is going to be the right way. So Mility, I'm saying Mility. Thank you. Thank you also to Claire, Jennifer, Stephen, Onica, Laura, Hallie, Davis, Samuel, Celeste, Charlie, Megan, Jacob, Jamie, Eden, Allison, Grace, Maria, Heather, Shelly, Nissa, Katya, Justin, Jasmine, Natasha, Ryan. We got Autumn, we have Flannery, Ashley, Nurse Stephanie probably is your actual given name, not Nurse Stephanie without a space in there. Stephanie, I'm just going to say. We have Olivia, Natalie, Marie, Maddie, Amy, William, and Brenner. Thank you all so much for being new subscribers.

We say this all the time, and we really do mean it. You are our only source of income for our work that we do here at Tooth and Claw. And without your support, it's the simple fact of reality, we wouldn't be able to keep doing this. So it's all because of you guys. And we really are forever grateful and we can't express it enough. And we look forward to talking to you more over on Patreon. Thanks again. And we'll see you in the next one.

Bye.