EBay has hundreds of listings for taxidermy bats, and Etsy has nearly a thousand.
After this article went up, I got some more data from the Department of the Interior, that I had requested before writing it, and I just finally sorted and wanted to share.
In short, over the course of 1.75 years, 22,426 bats came legally into the U.S., 23% of which went to oddities/sales shops, 70% went to museums/academic/research, and 7% were unknown/redacted. More info below the cut.
I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of the Interior asking about bats imported into the U.S. between January 1, 2016, and October 4, 2017 (when I filed the request.) That’s 1 year and 277 days, or 1.75 years.
Here is the data that they sent me in an Excel spreadsheet/Google sheet, which I’ve copied to a public Google file. If you’re looking at the “Standard Report” sheet, I added the column that says “Academic or No,” separating them into “Academic” (Universities/museums/research/biotech) vs. “No” (Shops, individuals.) Also “Unknown” for destinations that the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife redacted, one that was blank and two I didn’t know.
According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, over the course of the above dates, this number of bats were legally imported to the U.S.:
Total: 22,426
Academic: 15,817
Not Academic: 5,334
Unknown: 1,275
Note: "Unknown” means the importer was redacted, but not the number in the listing. If the number was redacted, then the listing isn’t included in these numbers.
69 different countries exported them, and these ones were the top 4:
China: 3,835
Indonesia: 2,119
Peru: 2,102
Liberia: 1,816
Feel free to use the spreadsheet above to find out more, like which academic and non-academic importers import the most, but you would have to use OpenRefine or manually determine which sets of importers are actually the same (ie, “REAL INSECT CO INC” is the same as “THE REAL INSECT CO INC” so you’d have to make sure those aren’t counted separately.)
You can file a FOIA request with the Department of the Interior as well. Maybe it would be interesting to see if there’s an increasing trend or not.
