Regarding your editorial today, ' Holy bat-poo ', first, bats are not ' dirty little flying mice '.
British bats are small, nocturnal, flying, insect-eating mammals of the order Chiroptera, not Rodentia.
As such, they don't make nests, they don't chew wood, they don't eat bread and they don't carry significant health risks.
The Bat Conservation Trust was set up to provide such facts on bats (not ill-informed opinions as in your editorial) so that people could make judgments for themselves.
David Attenborough has produced great, factual, wildlife programmes yet he is only the spokesman for the work of the thousands of scientists, researchers, naturalists, and, yes, organisations like the trust, without which no programmes could be made.
I recommend you to contact the trust for information (enclosing a donation) and rewrite your editorial.
If you are still anti-bat, so be it, but at least you will have come to an informed conclusion.
Harmless bat
Well, all right, your editorial ' Holy bat-poo ' (18 February) isn't meant to be taken too seriously, but why vilify the harmless bat?
Far from being ' dirty ' and ' unsavoury ' it spends as much time grooming its fur as any fastidious cat.
Bat droppings are tiny, and comprise only the wings and hard parts of the insects which bats eat.
If Anglican vicars have left bat droppings to accumulate for so long that their ceilings are sagging, they have only themselves to blame.
All they need to do is go up to the loft once a year and shovel them into a polythene bag; they make excellent compost.
It is typical of the rampant speciesism of Homo sapiens, relentlessly poisoning the planet with its own far more disgusting wastes, that the writer of your editorial should perceive clerical inertia as a bat problem.
We share our roof-space from April to September with several hundreds of pipistrelles, one of five different species occurring in Scotland, which your writer carelessly lumps together as' the appalling British bat '.
Our bats are no trouble at all.
On the contrary, they add to the pleasure of summer evenings.
They also eat about 3,000 midges a night each, a contribution to Scottish life which it is churlish of you not to acknowledge!
