At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Finally, on New Year’s Day 1956, a public health official in Texas, Dr. George C. Menzies, entered a hospital in Austin with rabies symptoms. Menzies had been studying caves in central Texas for evidence of rabies-bearing bats, but hadn’t been bitten or otherwise exposed to rabies as far as anyone knew. Yet somehow he became infected, and after just two days’ care he died in the usual hideous manner, in discomfort and terror, his eyes like saucers. The case was widely reported and resulted in a kind of vengeful hysteria. Officials at the highest levels concluded that extermination was an urgent and necessary step. Bats became the most friendless creatures in America. Years of steady persecution followed, and bat populations in many places suffered shocking depredations. In one case, the largest bat colony in the world, at Eagle Creek, Arizona, experienced a population fall from thirty million to three thousand in a matter of years.