Native plants for a Cape Cod garden

Television is dumbing down by the minute, and it’s embarrassing and annoying. Maybe as the stats say, everyone under 75 is getting all their news on the internet so I shouldn’t be too upset – but it is sad that today CNN had a huge background sign that had the word “Yield” spelled wrong. I am guessing it is all the under 30 year old employees brought up on IM and texting causing what I would call a national spelling crisis.

And the news is becoming a sick joke. The other night a news reporter said, I quote: “Luckily bats are suffering from ‘white nose syndrome’ so their populations are dying off.” Luckily?

This ignorant statement was in response to a case of rabies – the first in the state since 1935 – being contracted by a Cape Cod man from a bat bite. We know that the majority of rabies cases are caused by dog bites. Can you imagine the outcry if a newscaster had said “Well we won’t have to worry about those nasty dog bites anymore; luckily man’s best friend will be dead by 2012 due to a disease spreading rapidly among canines.”

To make matters worse, this moronic news report was accompanied by a video of a dilapidated home overrun with bats, crawling out of a broken window. Was this the rabies’ victim’s home? We aren’t told. But we are definitely given an impression that bats are dirty, deadly and should be destroyed at all costs.

I would probably be freaked out if bats took over my house. With any wild animal living in close proximity to humans – like squirrels or raccoons – they shouldn’t be living in our homes. They do carry disease. This should have been addressed, that perhaps the man did not have anyone to look after him or his home so it became dangerously overrun with bats. However, the manner in which this report basically said “bats carry disease and it’s a good thing they’re dying off in droves” was irresponsible, erroneous and upsetting.

This Boston Globe article from last year explains what they are happy about: (There is) “a 99 percent chance of regional extinction of little brown bats within the next 16 years. If mortality rates continue to slow over time, that timeline could stretch out, with a greater than 90 percent chance of regional extinction within 65 years. Researcher Winifred Frick said, in 2010: “This is one of the worse wildlife crises we’ve faced in North America.”

These same people are going to complain when we’re overrun with all the insects these little guys eat. We have very little ecosystem left, it is ridiculously out of balance. We should be working to reclaim wildlife habitat where at all possible so animals aren’t forced to seek shelter in our homes, not rejoicing in their demise. “(Insect-eating) bats are of considerable value to forests, fields, and to agriculture by suppressing insect populations, but they also sustain cave ecosystems,” says BU researcher Tom Kunz. “Bat guano is often the only organic input to caves” and helps support salamanders, fish, and other species in them.