Refresher.

I remember.

I swear I heard that story about a baby bunny

Oh ye gods I remember both of these. CPR on the bunny and breastfeeding the bats. ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod It creeps me right out even thinking about it. Why! Are! People!

I wish I knew

I was in a country where one of the things they sold at the open-air market was dried bats. Told a friend who eats ANYTHING about this and they were like Noooooppppeee.

Oh yeah nopenopenopenope!

Wow VERY VERY nope

Probably, but bats are a major vector for rabies.

oh I know! I just…had not heard that particular brand of crazy with BATS

Not to retraumatize Ursula, but that discussion had a variety of critters and poor life decisions by humans.

A lot of people would probably see retraumatizing Ursula as revenge.

I’m pretty sure she has more than enough interesting animal facts to traumatize us in response.

I'm sure she remembers the discussion; breastfeeding bats made it into her Hemlock and Silver.

Haven’t read it yet, but that’s a good reason to move it up on my TBR list!

It's a very minor mention, just tossed off as part of a sentence. On the other hand, it's an excellent book and well worth reading.

I read most of her books, it’s just nice to know she’s put an Easter egg in the book.

Thanks to Bluesky's thread compression, I had to click through to find that we're talking about breastfeeding here; I thought y'all were on to autistic bats...

did I help dress an autistic, hyperlexic three-year-old as the Count one Halloween? sure did. You can pick up ring bearer tuxes CHEAP on eBay, the ribbon cost more (the cape we ran up from green fabric from the stash)

Hey, bats are totally cute; I felt like jumping up and down and going "SQUEE!" when circumstances forced me to retrieve a tiny bat from between some pallets with my bare hands (Is rabies a thing for them in Germany too...?) and then was holding it. But why the fuck does one breastfeed cute animals?!

Same question - why do people try to take selfies with bears, attempt to pet bison, and otherwise act as if wildlife is tame? Might blame it on Disney, but lack of common sense is also in play.

Well, that's stupid too. But approaching a bear is still one tiiiny step below breastfeeding them imo. (I would like to point out that even though I didn't know about possible rabies, I was very aware that the bat might bite me, there was just no other way to retrieve it without harming it.)

Rabies does exist in Germany, and apparently *only* in bats (Germany has been declared free of terrestrial rabies), but it's very rare there.

Oh. Oh dear. I remember that one. She gave a baby bunny CPR after her indoor/outdoor CAT brutally mauled it. Oh and she refuses to believe that collars that break away if snagged exists when people were like "PUT A COLLAR WITH A BELL ON YOUR CAT"

Oh! Oh! And she was made people were going wtf, but ma'am. You do not give cpr to a baby bunny and if you are so concerned about how the mama bunny feels, stop letting your cat out to maul the bunnies.

(Oh! Right! And this wasn't modern CPR where you focus on chest compressions unless there's someone else to do the breathing. There was mouth to mouth attempted. She got sick. This wasn't even the first time. Boy was that day on bluesky a trip)

I remember that one, she got tularemia!

The thing is, I could even comprehend a choice to roll the dice bc antibiotics exist, but the next step is to pop into a medical environment for the antibiotics to start on and you can throw them away if the rabbit tests clean.

Iirc she didn’t know that rabbits, shockingly, carry rabbit fever until she was sick enough to land in the ER

Literally why it's called that *frantic handwaving* And even if she hadn't heard of the particular thing, like, wildlife licks their butts.

right that all sounds very familiar