Bats are being killed in Southeast Asia specifically to sell to American dead-bat enthusiasts, much of the supply on eBay and Etsy.
Between mid-2000 and 2013, the United States imported 114,927 bats. A total of 113,200 of those bats were dead—that’s nearly 9,000 slaughtered bats per year. Most of these bats end up for sale on eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Instagram and in brick-and-mortar oddities stores.
The carnage has some conservationists and bat enthusiasts worried. Merlin Tuttle, a bat expert at Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation, notes the extreme plight of bats in Southeast Asia. “I’ve seen huge losses, mostly due to various kinds of over-harvesting, especially at cave entrances, either for food or for sale as mummies,” Tuttle writes in an email to Newsweek. He says a cave that used to house hundreds of thousands of bats at a time is now completely empty.
The vast majority of the bats come from Indonesia, the leading exporter of legally cleared wildlife shipments into the United States. But the legal requirements for export do not require an explanation of how, why or by whom the animals were killed.
And the legality of those deaths is highly questionable. The phrase “ethically sourced” appears on many listings of dead bats for sale. Some sellers note that no animals were killed or poached. But Tuttle says such sound practice cannot possibly hold true for all sellers. “It is a virtual certainty that the bats you’ve seen advertised are not sustainably harvested,” he writes. “Any bat that died naturally would be quickly destroyed by ants or other arthropods or consumed by a scavenger.”
Read more at Newsweek
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