If The Daily Caller has said it once, we’ve said it 1,000 times: Don’t pick up some possibly injured bat you find on the ground by the high school gymnasium because you are all sad and you want to help.
At least 22 students at a high school in the Orlando area failed to heed this sage advice. Consequently, they may have contracted rabies.
The day-long incident occurred on Monday at South Lake High School in Groveland, Fla., reports the Orlando Sentinel.
It’s not clear how the rabid bat — a Mexican free-tailed bat — ended up on the ground.
In any case, according to freshman Knowlen Kirkland, he saw a bunch of students poking at the nocturnal flying mammal.
Kirkland wanted to be a hero, he said, so he decided to use a trusty gym T-shirt to pick up the bat. Then, he put the bat in a nearby tree.
“You could say I’m an animal lover,” Kirkland told the Sentinel. “I was afraid the other students might hurt it more than it already was hurt. I felt bad for it. I was safe with the way I handled it though, so I’m not really worried.”
After Kirkland put the bat in a tree, another student, decided it would be a good idea to pluck it back out of the tree and bring it to her biology class.
The plan failed, however, because the biology teacher promptly rejected the idea of some random bat from God-only-knows-where loitering in a public school classroom.
“The teacher told the student that it couldn’t come into the room and told the student to talk with administrators because it shouldn’t be on campus,” South Lake High principal Rob McCue told the Sentinel on Thursday.
The teacher also alerted school officials.
All told, 23 people — all minors — came into contact with the bat.
That grand total includes 22 students on the campus of South Lake High and some kid who got near the bat when a student traipsed home with it, according to Orlando Fox affiliate WOFL.
At some eventual point — on Tuesday — some unidentified person with some sense got hold of the bat and sent it away for testing.
Sure enough, the creature tested positive for rabies.
The bat’s exciting two days then came to an abrupt halt. Local health-department officials killed it.
Officials then searched the South Lake High campus for more rabid bats. They found none.
No students have thus far tested positive for rabies, but local officials are strongly urging parents to have any children tested if the children came in contact with the bat.
“I know if it was my child I would make sure they get vaccinated and treated like they had been bit just in case,” McCue, the principal, told the Sentinel.
“Rabies is a potentially fatal disease,” Florida health department spokesman Aaron Kissler told the newspaper. “It is important not to handle wild animals, to be aware of unusual acting animals and to keep pets vaccinated against rabies.”
In the Orlando area, rabies cases most frequently occur in bats, raccoons, foxes and unvaccinated cats.
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