Let These Bats Fuck In Peace

Preseason football can feel pointless; enough so that those watching are sometimes compelled to turn to more interesting pursuits. Such as having sex on the field, as these bats did in Saturday night’s Lions-Ravens game, captured by Baltimore Sun photographer Karl Ferron:

Obviously, several questions follow.

First, the bats’ decision to use the endzone as their setting here. You get to make some jokes about scoring, sure, there’s no ambiguity about what you’re going after here, and yet—a little too on the nose, maybe? Like, you’re already fucking on an NFL field in the middle of a game, you don’t need anything else to emphasize what you’re doing here.

As far as an inquiry regarding the bats’ activity goes, that’s all I got. But for human activity around the bats, there is plenty left vague. Namely: “escorted safely.” What does it mean to be escorted safely if you are a bat caught mid-coitus? Pictures show a stadium official wearing plastic gloves picking up the pair. So, okay, presumably the gloves mean that it’s safe for the official. But safe for the bats? What is safe about being picked up and carried away in the middle of sex? Especially when there was conflicting information about the status of the sex at the time of removal: first Ferron believed they were still attached, but he then said their activity was “ broken off” when they were taken from the field. Not saying they were escorted unsafely. Just saying that anyone concerned with the safety of bats (which should be all of us, bats are really goddamn important) should care about what people mean when they say they’re handling bats safely. This isn’t even touching the question of where the bats were taken.

And not directly related to the welfare of the bats, but relevant: the decision to hashtag “batsex.” Some brief research revealed that this hashtag is used surprisingly often! But rarely, if ever, is it used to describe actual bats having sex (unlike Batman, who you can see in various erotic scenarios if you want).

Baltimore’s bats deserve better. Let these bats fuck in peace.