Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [21]
Now it was all starting to make sense—why 99 percent of everything that had ever been written about vampire bats dealt solely with the common vampire bat, and why even bat experts had told me that all three vampires would act similarly. Desmodus rotundus had been maintained successfully in captivity for nearly sixty years—with some individual specimens surviving for as long as twenty years. Additionally, these bats were numerous across their widespread range and therefore relatively easy to obtain (hence the name “common,” I guess). They were also cheap to feed—as long as you had a ready supply of cow blood on hand. Plus, they were interesting as hell, with a slew of unique behavioral, anatomical, and physiological features.
The other blood-feeding bats, Diphylla ecaudata, the hairy-legged vampire (which didn’t live in Trinidad), and its white-winged relative, Diaemus youngi, were far more rare (relatively speaking) within their limited ranges. They were much more difficult to locate and capture than Desmodus, and reports on the difficulty maintaining them in captivity only served to compound the problem.
As a result, most researchers (with a few notable Mexican and South American exceptions) simply avoided working on two of the three vampire bat species. Hence, there were relatively few studies on these bats—especially on topics like comparative anatomy or behavior. Thanks to Farouk Muradali, though, who had graciously decided to let me in on his secret for maintaining Diaemus in captivity, the door would soon be wide open for the comparative work I’d proposed to undertake.
Hand feed them until they start guzzling cow blood. How simple, I thought, until Farouk allowed me to do just that with one of the bats his crew had captured the night before. With no hesitation, I showed off years of animal handling experience by mishandling the syringe and squirting the poor creature with an eyeful of cow blood.
“Must be the gloves,” I said.
Farouk shot me a sideways glance, then smiled. “Yes, that must be it,” he said.
Luckily for the bats, I got better.
“Slaughterhouse Bob” reminded me of Popeye with an extremely selective case of Tourette’s syndrome. He was generally a friendly sort of fellow and he seemed genuinely amused that a couple of Cornell types showed up each week at 5 a.m. looking for cow blood. At the first sight of a health inspector, though, Bob’s conversation would undergo a seamless transition into a machine-gun barrage of obscenity that would have made the most hardened dockworker blush like a ten-year-old girl. It was an uncomfortable moment for the health inspector as well since the cursing was clearly directed at him. Additionally, while Bob was ranting he was also wielding a nasty device known in the slaughterhouse trade as a captive bolt stunner. This was an instrument that looked like a cross between a power drill and Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum.*35
Typically, Kim and I would stand back as Bob herded a single captive cow into the “stunning box,” a heavy-duty, steel-railed enclosure, designed to keep the doomed animal from doing anything more than just standing there. This process generally began right after the health inspector realized that there was somewhere else he needed to be. Stepping up onto the bottom rail of the box, Bob placed the business end of the captive bolt stunner against the cow’s skull, at the center of an imaginary X formed by the animal’s eyes and the base of its horns. Bob never appeared to rush and he never “chased the cow’s head,” taking his time for one clean shot.
The concussive impact of the bolt stunner discharging sounded like a small-caliber pistol firing in an enclosed room (which in some sense is exactly what was happening). The results were as instantaneous as they were stereotypical. The animal collapsed, its brain penetrated by the steel bolt, which had already retracted back into the instrument.
Bob bent down, checking for eye reflexes by touching the cow’s cornea. Anything resembling a blink