If you place your bat house according to instructions, occupants are unlikely to be caught by cats as it will be too high up for them. Dogs will have as much as interest in guano as they do any bird poop and are very unlikely to ever interact with a bat. We recommend that all your animals be vaccinated for rabies, as is common practice. If your house pet ever brings a bat into the house, call animal control to properly care for or safely dispose of the animal. Never handle the bat yourself.

We get that question a lot. Bats already live all around us, and the chances of getting rabies from a bat is exceedingly rare. Like all mammals, bats can contract rabies (though often at a lower rate than other mammals like raccoons or skunks), but transmission to humans is extremely rare, with just 1-2 cases per year in the U.S. and Canada combined. It’s worth noting that in the majority of those cases, it was a result of a human making the mistake of touching the bat. Never do that. Bats are not pets and should never be handled. For anyone who simply doesn’t handle bats, the odds of contracting any disease are exceedingly remote. Additionally, there are hundreds of thousands of bats living in bat houses across North America, and according to our bat expert, Merlin Tuttle, there's not a single recorded case of a bat house owner being attacked by a bat.  In Austin, Texas 1.5 million bats live under the Congress Ave Bridge in the center of the city, have attracted millions of visitors to view their spectacular emergence close-up, and none has ever been attacked or contracted a disease. Less than half a percent of the bat population ever carries rabies, and those that do die off very quickly.