It's been a wild time since Thursday morning. At about 5:30 AM I woke to my cat messing around by my head and trying to get at the window. This was unusual because he’s on my sleep schedule and usually sleeps through the night until my alarm goes off. When I picked him up to to take him outside of the room, he immediately started writhing around in my hands, which is even more unusual because he always goes limp when I pick him up before settling in my arms as a perch. As soon as I set him down outside the room, he sprinted back in before I could close the door. Finally, when I closed the door fast enough to keep him out, he started yowling loudly from behind the door, which is completely unprecedented, and that’s when I realized something is in the room he’s fixated on.
That something turned out to be a bat that slipped in through a gap in the window screen. The cat ended up chasing the bat out of the room and I found it flying in circles in the kitchen. I quickly emptied the last remnants of a protein tub and managed to catch it after it stopped to rest.
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Animal control picked up when I rang them and said an officer would be out later to pick it up if I leave it outside, which led to this funny scene of a live bat trapped in a jar of protein left out on my porch.
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In my haste to get through all of this and make it to work, I realized I hadn’t even marked that there was a live bat inside. I joked that any porch pirates were going to get a nasty surprise… And then realized shit, that WOULD be really effing bad if the bat has rabies and we couldn’t test for it, which is the whole point of trapping it and not just releasing it outside. Luckily at around 3 PM an officer left a message on my phone that he was at my property and he wasn’t sure if the bat was in the protein case because dispatch hadn’t left detailed instructions: “I see a creatine or protein container and don’t want to steal your delivery by accident.” We got it cleared up and he ended up taking it for testing.
The next day we got the very good news that it was negative for rabies. The officer still wanted to meet with me on Saturday to fill out paperwork. Meeting him in person, I found him to be a very nice guy but holy shit, the process is wack! I ended up having to pay $130 for the county’s services, which one would assume is what tax dollars are for and and is a great way to encourage people NOT to undergo the proper process and report rabies exposure incidents. Throughout this whole conversation, the cat in question came next to me and the officer and sat down as if he was part of the meeting and he totally charmed the guy.
At least I got an interesting story out of it. The officer also mentioned that the bat was completely covered in protein dust when they took it out.
Also, kudos to my cat, who would not give up. If he hadn’t woken me up, I’d have been sound asleep with a possibly-rabid bat messing around in my bedroom. But what’s shitty is I found out they were on the verge of taking my cat away to quarantine him and “decided” not to, which is infuriating. How is that a decision after the test came back negative? The officer was real nice personally, but the process left a very bad taste in my mouth
