Bats are ugly, only a very weird person would call them cute. They often represent evil in movies and TV programs. If you tried to draw a picture of a demon you would probably end up with a bat picture. They are known to be rabies infected and will give you rabies with a bite. And I have never seen a menu from a restaurant that offered bat as one of their foods of choice. As a result I have never gotten negative feedback on any of my bat-killing stories. So here goes another one.

Bats don’t have much in the way of eyesight. They fly around using sonar to see and navigate with. They make these “ping” sounds and they hear them as they rebound off of objects and things in their path. They eat bugs and their sonar is so good that they can spot a bug and catch and eat it in mid-flight. So if you try and hit a bat with a baseball bat you will miss badly because their sonar easily picks it out and dodges your swing.

My brothers and I used to kill bats using a tennis racquet. The holes in the racquet made it harder for their sonar to connect on. The bats would fly a circular route through the barn where the light attracted bugs then out the door and back around and through the barn again entering in through a window. One of us would have the tennis racquet ready for a mighty swing standing right in front of the window that they entered the barn through. Another one of us would be looking out the door and watching and the moment we would see a bat entering the window we would yell “Now!” and the tennis racquet-wielding brother would swing and often smack a bat head-on, and knock it across the room into the wall dead as a piece of wood. The key to the kill was the timing between the “spotter” and the “swinger.” It took a little practice but it wasn’t long before we would kill half a dozen bats.