Miranda Devine, Bob Katter, and first kill all the bats ...

(Above: is that Elmer Fudd, or I do declare, Bob Katter and Miranda the Devine).

What was that phrase of Shakespeare's?

First kill all the bats ...

Hang on, it was lawyers. Meh, bats, lawyers, what's the difference, and there's plucky Bob Katter going to do those pesky bats down in a gigantic baticide (Bob Katter says his party would kill all flying foxes in urban areas).

How killing bats/foxes in urban areas would solve the problems of horses and people involved in horses in rural settings must remain something of a mystery, unless you take the view that Australia is one vast landscape of ticky tacky houses and concrete and tar parking lots, and so everywhere it's batten down the hatches bats, your time is up.

But once someone's called for a baticide - watch out Batman and suspiciously young boy wonder companion Robin - there's sure to be batty followers, determined to eradicate the bat plague, and who could be battier than Miranda the Devine furiously scribbling The reality is, we've all gone batty.

The Devine takes as her text for the day the havoc that the myxo virus wrought on rabbits in Australia in the fifties, and mourns the way it would probably be called genocide today rather than rabbitcide, and then goes on to explain how the rabbitcide was a wondrous precedent for the baticide.

Personally speaking, the opening of a rabbit to discover it had mxyo was extremely traumatic, because the rabbit had no value:

Rabbits had supported generations of rural Australians. Exports of rabbit skins fell from about A$14 million in 1950-51 to A$4.5 million in 1954-55. Felt industry workers were also adversely affected. (CSIRO on rabbitcide here).

Moving right along, what the Devine forgets to mention is that while in the short term myxo was effective, it's been estimated that genetic resistance in the remaining rabbits allowed the population to recover to 200-300 million by 1991 (wiki here), from its 600 million peak.

In the area I came from rabbits once more frolicked, ran wild and free, and provided an amiable afternoon's shooting without in any way denting the capacity of the population to reproduce and flourish ...

The CSIRO then bungled the release of the calicivirus and it too produced immunised rabbits, and I remember looking out the window of the nursing home in which my mother spent her last months, and marvelling at how many bunnies once more ran wild and free and frolicked in the rural sun.

Of course the CSIRO likes to dress up the release of RHDV as a success story, but really after the initial killing fields (10 million within 8 weeks according to the wiki here), the bunnies bounced back.

In an even funnier tale of incompetence, the New Zealand authorities decided to ban the virus, only to see it released by some wild cat farmers, and the result of the half-baked release is that ten years on, the bunnies are back in the Mackenzie Basin with a vengeance.

What's startling in the sort of baticide proposed by the Devine and Katter is that she seems to think the scientists and bureaucrats routinely reviled by climate denialists as incompetent and incapable of getting anything right, are somehow the people who should now be attending to the baticide.

Of course the bats should be culled, just like rabbits once were.

In 1950 we had scientific luminaries such as Professor Frank Fenner, Dr MacFarlane Burnet and Dr Ian Clunies Ross arguing the logical case for myxomatosis.

But where is the CSIRO when you need it now? Too busy on the carbon tax bandwagon, probably.

Yes indeed, where are the CSIRO killers of yore.

Come to think of it, where's the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations which introduced the cane toad into Australia in 1935 to control the native cane beetle (wiki here about the toads, not just supporters of Queensland football).

But there's a few problems involved in any cull, which for a start confuses a couple of processes, like you know, shifting, moving, relocating, culling, eradicating and exterminating (or perhaps decimating, in the good old Roman one in ten style).

There could be an attempt at physical culling (scientists roaming the streets taking pot shots at bats and flying foxes with their double barrelled shotguns, a sure way to produce tranquility in an urban setting), or there could be a release of a virus to kill all the bats, and so combat the viruses they carry.

But as the rabbits have shown, attempts to use viruses have either been defeated by resilient bunnies, or botched by inept releases of viruses, the consequences of which can't be scientifically charted.

Silly old Queensland deputy premier Paul Lucas has called for sense amongst the baticide hysteria:

"... the last thing that we want to do is have people doing yipee shoots - trying to shoot bats out of trees when there are hundreds of millions of bats probably in Queensland." (here).

What a spoilsport. What fun to see the Devine and Bob Katter joining forces to cleanse Hyde Park with the aid of a couple of shotties.

Lucas seems to think that developing a vaccine for horses might be more sensible than killing all the bats:

"They're animals. You can't reason with them. It is not possible to ask flying foxes to go somewhere else," he told reporters.

Indeed. In the past we've found it impossible to reason with the Devine or ask her to move on, go somewhere, anywhere else.

"It's like saying we should have a cull of all sharks because there is a potential of shark attacks, or that we should kill all snakes because people are bitten by snakes." (here)

Or cull all the commentariat commentators working for News Corp because there's a potential for developing a rabid mind once you've read their rabies-inducing words ...

But of course that's the very thing that the yeehah good old girl Devine wants. An epic bat shoot worthy of Elmer Fudd up against that wascally wabbit ...

The push has come from the horsie crowd (Peter McGauran in Fruit bat cull urged to halt spread of lethal Hendray virus, Basil Nolan in Bat culls must be considered in Hendra fight), so I guess it would be bad timing for the pond to call for the culling of horsie types and their thoroughbred industry and the banishing of the gambling-addicted racing industry from urban areas ...

It's when you take a look at past viral interventions in the wild, or cullings, that you begin to ask how it all might be done, and in a useful, effective way.

When Katter talks in his baticide of "removing all flying foxes in urban areas", what does he mean? Mass removals, which will see bats taken from urban areas and set loose amongst the horses in rural areas? And after a stern speaking to, a Kattercide so to speak, the humbled bats deciding to stay in their new abodes?

It's at this point that Katter gets vague, and waves his hands grandly:

"Whether we shoot them, or what we have to do, that is a decision for the future.

"If it comes to a choice between our children dying and us going out and killing flying foxes, then I have a very grave moral problem with not going out there and killing the flying foxes." (here).

Uh huh, here the pond was thinking it was a matter of horses and humans, but it was actually Helen Lovejoy and won't someone think of the dying children.

Meanwhile, Miranda the Devine goes Hitchcockian, invoking The Birds, and dragging in talk of Ebola and lyssavirus in Ghana, and calling bats the Typhoid Marys of the animal kingdom. It's a truly wonderful, yes fully, wondrously batty piece, with grave warnings about migratory movements in West Africa, and their deep relevance to Australia ...

Speaking of movies, I don't think I've had as much fun since watching triple pork Dustin Hoffman go about his business in the 1995 virus flick Outbreak ... The bats is coming ...

It seems bats are in plague proportions and are causing havoc everywhere, showering faeces on diggers at dawn services, abusing teachers and students, and placing rural residents under siege. Oh noes, it's the children and the diggers ...

The Devine notes that two people have died from lyssavirus since 1996 and then there's the Hendra virus, and so now we're waiting on her proposal for a shark cull, since, thanks to Taronga, we know that in the past twenty years there have been 24 recorded fatalities ... (your shark statistics here, with a stark reminder that sharks first entered the killing fields records by killing an indigenous female on the North Coast of NSW in 1791).

What we need is a sharkicide!

The Devine's attitude is to treat all nature as a kind of pest:

Yet no serious moves are being made to eradicate this airborne pest ...

Thank god if we've got a nail or two around the house, we'll know where to find a hammer.

Just get out the Mortein and eradicate the airborne pest, in much the same way as we've eradicated the pesky rabbit.

Oh wait, we haven't managed to eradicate an introduced species like the wretched bunny (not even those bold as brass damn Indian myna birds that soil our back yard), and yet suddenly we're going to take out a massive native population without a whit or jot of regret, or a single thought as to the consequences.

Well the Devine wins hands down our 'batty Hitchcockian column of the year' award, with a judges' commendation to Bob Katter for sending her off the batty deep end.

Why it's almost as good a solution to living with nature as her proposal to hang greenies from the nearest lamp post, and never mind the stench of the rotting corpses when they might well be turned to good use as agricultural fertiliser ...

As for the issues involving bats and flying foxes, here's hoping there are sensible solutions, because you'll find bugger all in the Devine's piece ...

(Below: now here's a handy game, and you can win fun money too while you're at it)