People decorate for Halloween with dead bats, officials concerned

You can buy Halloween bat decorations – stuffed, plastic or neon – at Target . Or you could spend 50 US dollars in real corpses of Etsy, Facebook or eBay sellers.

Such spooky specimens are available all year round, mounted as strange but strangely cute wall hangings, hanging inside lanterns. even fashioned in macabre hair clips. They come bent and hung upside down, in vampire style or spread wings.

Bats are only a subset of a vast market taxidermy stupidities that decorate the trendy bars and are celebrated during visits of curiosities in the cities. Across the country. But federal officials say they are more and more concerned about dead bats, as their popularity seems to be increasing, especially around Halloween

The US Fish and Wildlife Service, whose inspectors control imports into the largest facility international courier John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York claims to have seized illegal cargoes of dead bats once or twice a month since a bat trend took flight in 2015. This figure doubles in late summer and the fall before Halloween, said Naimah Aziz, inspector for wildlife and fish resources at JFK.

"I think the quirk trade is more important than what we've done," Aziz said. "The only figures reflected in our information system, which we know, are those that are prohibited. It's only a drop in the bucket … probably 3% of what actually comes into the United States. "

The bats sent are of different species, and they are not much larger than mobile phones, which means that they are lightweight, she said." They are usually shipped from Indonesia by the mail, a method increasingly used for the smuggling of living creatures, especially species of scorpions and centipedes sought that can make a trip in a box difficult.

The problem of bats does not It's not a problem, they're usually in danger, she says.Apart from flying foxes, most species are not protected by international wildlife treaties or US laws, but banned shipments are generally mislabeled. and have no import-export license, said Aziz.The discovery of a box of bats in a mail bag then usually launches the inspectors into a do not seek identification of the species and, if it is not protected, seek the importer for the documents to be sorted.

"We have a shipment Aziz added that the inspectors" are waiting for a gentleman to get a license to declare the species ".

There is also another problem: the threat of a deadly disease. All bat shipments are also referred to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which require an additional import permit for bats. The CDC says it regulates incoming bats as they are potential reservoirs of infectious diseases, including rabies and Ebola. It requires dead bats to be "properly treated" to make them safe, either with high heat or with formaldehyde or another approved method.

Viruses such as rabies and Ebola "can not survive very long outside the host, but can survive for a long time. To survive longer in a dead animal, "Brian Amman, an ecologist with the CDC's viral special pathogens branch, said in an e-mail. "Even though it is unlikely that anything like Ebola is transmitted through an imported bat carcbad, even a small chance with a potentially deadly disease does too much."

How dead bats die ? It's not clear, said Aziz; The cause of death is not required, even for legally imported bats – about 9,000 of them arrive each year in the United States, according to a Newsweek survey citing federal figures.

Many online vendors praise their taxidermies as "ethical and sustainable," and some say they are trapped in nets by farmers whose crops cause damage to bats. </ P> <p> According to the World Wildlife Fund , the global conflict between humans and bats is about crops and many bats are killed in Indonesia, according to the World Wildlife Fund, but the organization says animals play an important ecological role in pollinating and dispersing plants

"The way they are preserved shocks me from being caught, they're not broken down, they're pretty much caught and probably treated," Aziz said about shipments found at JFK, whose number, she added, the alarm. "The amount I see must have an impact on the species."