Abstract
In recent years, historians and sociologists of science have shown how turn of the century natural history research and its public communication in Barcelona was intrinsically attached to certain political orientations and the historical context. Likewise, the way society perceived bats and promoted their ecological services has been increasingly researched by the community of bat researchers. In this article, I describe attitudes towards and perceptions of bats in the ‘public sphere’ of Barcelona in that period and examine them using public communication of science and history of science analytical tools. I performed an exhaustive search of the available newspaper and magazine articles using the Catalan and Spanish words for ‘bat’ in the online search engines of the national Catalan and Spanish libraries from 1888 to 1929. I compiled and reviewed a wide range of periodicals, covering different political orientations and representing several different types of publication. The articles were classified into four different categories. First, bats were commonly used as a symbol to represent the city and right-wing, conservative politics. Second, bats were often linked to negative adjectives that portrayed them as ugly, disgusting or diabolic. Third, many articles made an active effort to stop children chasing and killing bats. And fourth, I also identified a non-organised group of popularisers across the whole media spectrum who promoted what we call today the ecological services provided by bats, and especially their role as agricultural pest controllers. This study provides a better understanding of science popularisation, and specifically, perceptions of and attitudes towards bats during the studied period. This approach illustrates how historical accounts can be used today to improve perceptions of bats and suggest a more complex context of science popularisation.
Keywords
1. Introduction
Bats have had a terrible reputation throughout European Catholic tradition. They have been perceived as disgusting creatures, associated with evil, darkness, fear, impurity, vampirism, mystery, blasphemy and bad omens, and have even been used to represent the devil itself (Kahn et al., 2008; Lunney and Moon, 2011). The Bible described bats as ‘detestable’ and ‘unclean’ (Kahn et al., 2008) and even today they are still regularly depicted as repulsive animals (Knight, 2008; Prokop and Tunnicliffe, 2008). Beyond religious influences and due to their specific features, bats have been portrayed in popular culture as unnatural, hybrid creatures between birds and mammals and are often paired with nocturnal birds (Kingston, 2016; Todd, 2016). As perpetuated during the current coronavirus pandemic, bats are still associated today with lack of hygiene, infection and the carrying of diseases, despite scientists insisting that they should be viewed differently (Rocha et al., 2020).
Indeed, bats have often been recognised for their ecological services to humans, especially to farmers as pest controllers and guano providers (Hoffmaster et al., 2016; Kross et al., 2017; Kunz et al., 2011; Maine and Boyles, 2015; Puig-Montserrat et al., 2015). Considering the general decline in bat populations worldwide due to such factors as loss of habitat, the use of chemical pesticides and climate change, there have been active calls in recent years for education to foster a better perception of bats than the one that is rooted in tradition (Ghanem and Voigt, 2012; Hoffmaster et al., 2016; Kunz et al., 2011; Muylaert et al., 2016; O’Shea et al., 2016). Although much of this scholarly work acknowledges the historical roots of both traditional negative perceptions and positive attitudes towards bats, none of them uses history of science or more general science and technology studies as a means to understand these processes better (Kingston, 2016; Murphy, 1989).
In the 40 years between the Barcelona 1888 World Fair and the Barcelona 1929 International Fair, the city was transformed from an important albeit small port town into a modern industrial city (Hochadel and Nieto-Galan, 2016). As it expanded, Barcelona also witnessed cultural expansion that was closely linked to the active force of Catalan nationalism. The ‘Renaixença’ movement shaped this expansion, associating the ‘rebirth’ of Catalan culture, art, language and science with the expansion of the cultured conservative bourgeois Catholic and nationalist elites (Aragon, 2012; Bohigas, 2011; Roca-Rossell and Salavert, 2003; Senent-Josa, 1979). In parallel, this period was also a golden age for public interest in the natural sciences. Barcelona’s first Natural History Museum was inaugurated in 1882 (Aragon and Pardo-Tomás, 2016) and became a vehicle ‘for the cultural construction of an elitist, Catalanist, Catholic and conservative project for society’ (quote in Aragon and Pardo-Tomás, 2016: 47; see also Bohigas, 2011). Barcelona Zoo opened in 1892 (Carandell, 2018) with a project that presented exotic animals as sources of financial gain (Hochadel and Valls, 2016; Osborne, 1994). Furthermore, in 1899, the Catalan Institution for Natural History was founded with similar ideological intentions (Camarasa, 2000). Its founder, the researcher Joan Baptista Aguilar-Amat, who also the curator at the Natural History Museum, was one of several scientists who took a certain interest in bats and especially the search for new species in the Catalan-speaking area (Aguilar-Amat, 1910, 1920, 1934). This conservative Catholic view was very much opposed to the much more liberal approach to natural sciences that also had its audience in the city. A good example would be the university professor Odón de Buen, who was berated for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution (Nieto-Galan, 2012). It is within this scientific context of the creation of an ‘urban culture of natural history’ that the present study is framed (quote Hochadel and Valls, 2016: 26; for the concept of urban natural history, see also Nyhart, 2009; Valls, 2019).
The term ‘public sphere’, coined by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s, defines the urban space where cultural displays such as books, newspapers and magazines were circulated and discussed among the new liberal, mostly bourgeois, Western societies (Broman, 1998). According to Habermas, this had been happening since the eighteenth century, but it was in the twentieth century that the concept of ‘public sphere’ could be used to describe most urban societies (Broman, 1998). Although it has been criticised as Eurocentric and patriarchal, this concept of the ‘public sphere’ has been widely used to understand the phenomena of popular science in those historical periods (Nieto-Galan, 2016). Likewise, science historians have sought to explain how the nineteenth century represented a shift in the public perception of science, with the appearance of what we could call science popularisation books and, especially, of the increase in the periodical press (Cantor et al., 2004; Secord, 2000, 2014). In this context, the construction of the public image of science was a ‘result of negotiation processes between social groups, which ascribe different and sometimes conflicting meanings to science’ (González-Silva and Herran, 2009: 98). So, what meanings of science, and more specifically of bats, were presented in the early twentieth-century periodicals of Barcelona? How did the different ideological stances shape these meanings?
Although science popularisation in this period has been traditionally depicted as the top-down model, in which audiences were a mere ‘container’ to be filled with scientific information, this study will describe early attempts at what Brossard and Lewenstein call the ‘contextual model’ of science communication (Brossard and Lewenstein, 2010; González-Silva and Herran, 2009; Hilgartner, 1990), according to which audiences are considered and addressed in their social context, with their local knowledge and concerns (Brossard and Lewenstein, 2010). As several environmental historians have argued, this kind of approach can generate ‘genuine dialogue’ between natural sciences and humanities, showing how several ‘environmental problems have their source in human culture’ (Worster, 1996: 3, 9). This historicisation of the relationship between humans and bats in the public sphere may be helpful to illustrate the many ways and processes by which these perceptions were disseminated and how deep-rooted they were in Western popular culture. Historians’ attention to causation and context can introduce new perspectives not only on the past but also with regard to our understanding of the present (Isenberg, 2014: 5).
To sum up, through an exhaustive review of newspaper and magazine articles, I aim to assess how these perceptions of and attitudes towards bats were created, shaped and transformed during the rise of Barcelona’s urban natural history culture. Being a ‘presentist’ in Oreskes (2013) terms, this study aims to show how a historical approach to the analysis of public science communication could be helpful for our understanding of how these processes unfold in today’s science popularisation and, specifically, to improve perceptions and attitudes towards bats and awareness of their ecological benefits.
2. Methodology
To assess perceptions of and attitudes towards bats in the Barcelona ‘public sphere’, I conducted an exhaustive review of newspaper and magazine articles from 1888 to 1929 that included the Catalan (‘ratpenat’, ‘rata-pinyada’) and Spanish (‘muriciélago’) words for ‘bat’. The review was carried out using the online search engines of The Digital Periodical and Newspaper Library of the National Library of Spain (with a filter to select only publications based in Barcelona) and the Archive of Old Catalan Magazines of the Catalan National Library. These engines combined host 2787 magazines and newspapers, including major journals and magazines on the history of Catalonia (Arxiu de Revistes Catalanes Antigues (ARCA), 2020; Biblioteca Nacional de España, 2020). I also performed a search following the same criteria in the digital archives of La Vanguardia newspaper, one of the most important, long-lasting and widely read newspapers in Barcelona (González-Silva and Herran, 2009; Huertas, 2006). As it is the only one of the selected publications that is still being published today, it does not appear in the national archives.
All of the searches combined produced a total of 1082 articles from 58 different publications. Of these, I selected the documents for the review by observing a three-step process. First, I selected at least two periodicals for each of the options in five different categories: language (Catalan/Spanish), political orientation (progressive left/conservative right), religion (Catholic/Anticlerical), Catalanism (Catalanist/Not Catalanist) and publication type (newspaper/children’s magazine/satirical magazine; see Table 1). In the analysis and characterisation of the articles and publications, these categories are presented in combination, for example, Progressive Anticlerical Catalanism or Conservative Catholic Catalanism. The resulting collection included nine periodicals that accounted for 424 of the initial 1082 articles.
Selected publications and their characteristics.
The second step was to dismiss errors, repetitions and indirect references (e.g. the repeated advert for a movie called El Murciélago in La Vanguardia and other publications). After this, 94 articles were left, which were classified into four different categories that describe the most frequent attitudes to bats that appeared in the articles. These categories will be used throughout and account for the four sections of the discussion: (a) Barcelona’s coat of arms, (b) negative perceptions of bats, (c) determent of violence against bats among children and (d) scientific popularisation of the benefits provided by bats. In the final step of the selection process, I eliminated the articles that did not fit into any of these contexts (mainly related to certain accounts of early cave exploration in which bats are mentioned only peripherally). The final source material included a total of 74 articles published in nine different periodicals.
3. Results and discussion
This section is divided into four subsections devoted to each of the aforementioned categories. These categories, and therefore the perceptions attached to them, are not presented in a chronological manner, as most of them appear throughout the chosen period. The first subsection shows how the specific context of Barcelona at the turn of the century conditioned the public perception of bats. The second subsection describes how negative perceptions of bats were not attached to a specific religious context but appeared all across the ideological spectrum. The third subsection describes different ideological approaches to the determent of violence against bats among children in Barcelona’s public sphere. Finally, the fourth subsection deals with the scientific popularisation of the benefits provided by bats among different publics and media.
Barcelona and bats, a close relationship
There is a medieval legend that connects bats with Catalonia and, subsequently, Barcelona. In the thirteenth century, King Jaume I led the battles against the Arabs during the Christian Reconquista of the Eastern side of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands, which today comprise the Catalan-speaking areas of Spain. The legend goes that bats saved Jaume I’s life by waking him up just a second before an ambush by the Arabs near Valencia. In Mallorca, another legend tells of how Jaume I was in the first Mosque that was converted to Christianity when he found a trapped bat. His companions wanted to kill it, but Jaume refused to believe their superstitions and instead saved the animal’s life (Serra, 2009). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Catalonia was undergoing its cultural ‘Renaixença’, one of the main aims of which was to acknowledge Catalan achievements during medieval times. The symbolism around Jaume I and his encounters with bats gained in popularity and was commonly linked to this movement (Anonymous, 1889). As a result, from the eighteenth century onwards, the bat symbol was incorporated in the Barcelona coat of arms (Fluvià, 2012).
Likewise, in this period, depictions of bats were used as decorations in art-nouveau architecture. For example, they are present in Josep Vilaseca’s Arc de Triomf, the monumental entrance to the 1888 Barcelona World Fair; in Antoni Rovira’s historic Sant Antoni market building (1882); in Pere Falqués’ famous streetlight-benches in Passeig de Gràcia (1906) and in Gaudi’s Palau Güell (1888), which has a bat in its wind vane (Capellà and Galmés, 2015). The prominent locations of these bat representations in the public space suggest that bats had been appropriated into urban bourgeois life, and a more detailed study of this decorative use of bats during the Catalan art-nouveau movement would be of major scholarly interest.
Nineteen of the articles related to the bat iconography on Barcelona’s coat of arms appeared in L’Esquella de la Torratxa and four in La Veu de Catalunya (Table 3). The overwhelming majority of articles were written in Catalan (92%), reinforcing the close relationship between the bat on the coat of arms and the Catalanist movement (Table 2). In its social and political critique, the anticlerical left-wing Catalanist satirical magazine L’Esquella de la Torratxa linked the bat on the coat of arms with Conservative Catalanist politics (Capdevila, 2013; Tenu, 1921). For instance, in 1910, when the four-time mayor of Barcelona, the conservative Joan Coll y Pujol died, L’Esquella de la Torratxa produced a caricature with a bat flying in the background as a symbol of his long-standing career as the city’s mayor (Anonymous, 1910). In Figure 1, the bat was used to symbolise the city of Barcelona in a critique of its corrupt administrators. On at least nine occasions, writers at L’Esquella de la Torratxa used the bat on the coat of arms as a metaphor to mock Catalanist politics. According to these articles, the bat needed to be replaced with a tram or a boat, as Paris had done with its own coat of arms (Paradox, 1920), or exchanged for a chicken (March, 1900). Their message reinforced the idea that bats were thin, decayed and weak, and likened them to the Catalanism movement (Anonymous, 1906; March, 1901).
Sample size and incidence of each category according to language used, political field, Catalanism, and target audiences. (Sample size and percentages of each frame (Barcelona’s bat, Negative Views, Bat killings and Useful bats) within each category).
Front cover of L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 16 November 1917. The Barcelona bat calls corrupt politicians ‘thieves’ for trying to use the city’s coffers for their own financial gain.
The representation of the bat in the coat of arms was also associated with the Catalanist ‘Renaixença’ movement, mainly in La Veu and En Patufet (Tables 1 and 2). While La Veu was often used by Catholic Catalanist scientists, En Patufet was a Catalan nationalist conservative and moralist children’s magazine to ‘teach children the Catalan language’ and ‘respect for life and nature’ (Castellanos, 2004; Hochadel and Valls, 2016). In 1905, for instance, En Patufet published an article that tried to explain the reasons behind the bat in Barcelona’s coat of arms. It first pictured bats as ugly but later told the legend of Jaume I and used them as a symbol of the unity of the king and the civil political leadership that ‘was the strength that made [Medieval] Catalonia great’. According to these articles, as ‘bats live together in caves to avoid external dangers’, kings and civil politicians survived the same dangers by sticking close together (En Patufet, 1905).
The presence of bats in the city’s coat of arms was used as a symbol that linked medieval legends with present-day political discourses, mainly that of restoring a supposed Medieval Catalan greatness. In Barcelona’s public political debate and satire, bats were not nocturnal mammals but the representation of specific political ideas that shaped the people of Barcelona’s perceptions of these mammals. The connection between Barcelona’s traditions and legends and bats in the public sphere shows how, in order to understand perceptions of and attitudes towards bats in a particular context, the historical and political features of this context have to be taken into account. As many authors have pointed out, these beliefs shape the way that humans in different geographical and social contexts relate to bats (Frembgen, 2006; Hoffmaster et al., 2016; Kingston, 2016).
Ugly, diabolic, dirty and unnatural: Negative perceptions of bats
All of the periodicals except La Pagesia published articles describing perceptions of bats as a negative force. La Vanguardia and L’Esquella had eight articles each; six appeared in En Patufet and four in La Veu (Table 3). A total of 59% of the Catalan articles presented these negative associations, which were particularly common in the Conservative Catholic and the Catalanist newspapers (Table 2). El Diluvio, for example, used the expression ‘ugly as a bat’, referring to a married man with money (Urrecha, 1922), and L’Esquella de la Torratxa presented the main character of a story as ‘grumbling more than a bat with a burned nose’ (Anonymous, 1919).
Sample size and incidence of each category in each of the selected periodicals. (Sample size and percentages of bats’ frames (Barcelona’s bat, Negative views, Bat killings and Useful bats) in each of the selected periodicals (La Veu de Catalunya, La Ilustración, Cu-Cut!, El Diluvio, El Camarada, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, La Vanguardia, La Pagesia, En Patufet).
An article can be counted under more than one category.
In the conservative Catalanist Catholic newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, the bat appeared in two different stories written by well-known authors. In 1903, it published a biblical story by, arguably, one of the most famous Catalan poets, Josep Carner (Ballart, 2006). In this story, the devil spoke to Joseph and Mary through a bat and was able to convince Joseph that Mary had a gold ring from another lover. However, an Angel then appeared and told him that the ring was a gift from God and that the bat was the devil. Joseph then ‘smashed the bat’s head’ with a ‘rod’ (Carner, 1903). As we will see in the following subsection, the practice of killing bats with a stick was common in Barcelona at the time, especially among children. Another short story in the same newspaper by the Catalan poet, writer and politician Manuel Folch i Torres featured a bat father and his son as its main characters. The young bat did not like school and kept escaping from home at night to go to cabarets and bars. At first, the father bat was angry with his son for such behaviour, but the son would later catch his father going out drinking too. With this story, the writer is suggesting that, just like the lazy drunkards among immoral non-Catholic workers, as represented by the father, bats cannot help behaving badly (Folch i Torres, 1907). These two moralistic stories show how bats were commonly associated with the devil, impurity, darkness, night, anger, bad behaviour and nightlife. These associations were led by Catholic, conservative beliefs that were promoted through La Veu de Catalunya.
These negative notions of bats also appeared in children’s magazines. For example, in a story published by En Patufet, the main character was ‘angrier than a bat’, and the same journal also used bats to create a scary atmosphere for story that took place in the darkness of the night (Kukablanka, 1921). In L’Esquella de la Torratxa, the poet Salvador Perarnau wrote a series of short poems about animals’ poetical features, including the caress of the butterfly that flies from flower to flower and the cry of the swallow as it flies around cathedrals. However, bats were not so fortunate. They were associated with darkness, using such negative metaphors as ‘mean spirit’, ‘malefic idea of a criminal’s head’, ‘mourning veil’ and a ‘piece of the night in every wing’ (Perarnau, 1924). These metaphors had a completely different tone to the symbolism of sweet feelings, gold dust, caresses and serene freshness used to describe the butterfly. In a murder story printed in Cu-cut!, ‘thick darkness’ surrounded the town when night fell ‘and the owl and the bat came out of their den to take possession of that black kingdom’ (Nadal, 1903).
The connection of bats with a dirty, unhygienic environment was also found in La Vanguardia. In 1903, a brief article explained that after an outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples, the local authorities suspected that the origin of the infection was the bats living in an abandoned building in the city. The article went on to detail the experiment performed by an Italian researcher called ‘Doctor Gosio’ to check this assertion using an unknown number of living specimens of the bat Vespertillo noctula, nowadays known as Nyctalus noctula. Gosio inoculated the bats with Yersinia pestis, and they all died ‘soon after’. An autopsy of the bats revealed a ‘large amount’ of plague bacilli. The article concluded that ‘the fleas that swarm on the bats must also spread the pathogenic germs’ (Atti des Linces, 1903; see also Albt, 1902).
Instances of negative perceptions of bats appeared in almost all the periodicals across the entire ideological and religious spectrum. However, while in La Veu, the Catholic linkage is clear and is even made explicit, in progressive periodicals, the religious side of that negative linkage is replaced by references to darkness, ugliness or disease. This shows how a proper understanding of these negative perceptions of bats not only requires consideration in the context of conservative and religious societies or sections of societies but also as something deep-rooted in popular views of these animals. Hence the need for scientific popularisation and social awareness of the role of bat populations to correct this traditional view of bats as disgusting, evil animals and replace it with more positive perceptions among the general public.
Moral values and pedagogical views to prevent bat killings
Concerns linked to the widespread bat killings were detected in five articles in La Vanguardia, five in En Patufet and two each in El Camarada and L’Esquella de la Torratxa (Table 3). These pieces were written in both Spanish and Catalan, with a high percentage appearing in Catholic Conservative, right-wing Catalanist and children’s magazines (Table 2).
Together with a relatively detailed anatomical and ethological description of bats, a long article in the conservative newspaper La Vanguardia (Tables 1 and 3) stated that ‘poor bats have had to cope with the consequences of being considered carriers of bad omens, therefore being persecuted and tormented in a thousand ways’. ‘A few days ago’, continued the journalist, ‘I saw a group of children knock down a bat with a broom, and then pin it by the wings and try to make it hold a burning cigarette’ (M, 1902). Similarly, an article in the Catalan children’s magazine En Patufet described how once ‘sunset arrives’ and bats leave their roosts, groups of ‘naughty boys with little common sense’, primarily peasants armed with long canes, sometimes with a scarf tied around them, began the ‘ignoble persecution’ of these animals (ABECÉ, 1923; Figure 2). If they managed to bring down a bat, which, according to the author, was easy and usually happened, the boys nailed it to the wall and burned it alive to listen to its screams, which these children associated with grumbles and blasphemy. Likewise, L’Esquella de la Torratxa published an article with the title ‘The free birds’, which claimed that Barcelona was going to ‘run out of bats’ because the ‘kids in the streets are wiping out the species with cane blows’ (Anonymous, 1915).
Page from En Patufet (1907), depicting a boy using a cane to hit flying bats.
Children’s magazines like En Patufet and El Camarada were the most engaged in this pedagogy to prevent children from persecuting bats (7 articles; Table 2). En Patufet’s writers were aware of the bat-killing problem, and promoted moral values in an active attempt to dissuade children from continuing these practices. Through poems and short stories, En Patufet was trying to teach children of the new urban middle class not only about the anatomical and ethological characteristics of bats but also the moral value of not killing them (for instance, J, 1909; Marinel·lo, 1907 see Figure 2). In a fictional piece in En Patufet, a child says that he wanted to kill bats because they ‘bring bad omens’ and were ‘disgusting’, but the narrator of the story explains how bats eat the insects that bother people at night and ended by saying that ‘ignorance leads us to commits many mistakes, but I am sure that this won’t happen to En Patufet readers, who know a lot about these things’ (Fábrega, 1909). This last sentence exemplifies the pedagogical top-down approach of En Patufet, (5 articles, 33%) a Catalanist conservative periodical, to traditional bat killing (Tables 1 and 3).
El Camarada was a children’s magazine published from Barcelona in Spanish and led by progressive, left-wing pedagogues. One of the best known of those was Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, a modern progressive education project (Marco, 2002). It frequently included science popularisation articles by famous authors like Juan Tomás Salvany (Civera, 1994), who was the author of a short story entitled ‘El Duende (the Elf)’ in which a man tells his nephew the story of an elf that turns out to be a bat: ‘There are no elves, there are bats’ (Salvany, 1889). In another similar tale in El Camarada, a pupil tells his teacher how a classmate had tortured and killed a bat the night before: ‘Why did you burn him with an ember?’ asked the teacher. ‘To hear him blaspheme’ answered the student. ‘And did he?’ asked the teacher, ‘I could not understand properly but. . .’ Then, the teacher said, ‘Forget these vulgar superstitions, the animal is only crying because you are burning it! And this is cruelty, which reveals men’s bad feelings’ (Navarro, 1889).
To summarise, a great deal of the selected articles drew similar conclusions, namely that the idea of protecting bats from such killings needed to be popularised among the population, and especially among children. However, different approaches were used depending on the ideological stance of each publication. While publications like En Patufet tried to prevent bat killings from a moral top-down approach to popularisation, El Camarada not only popularised the determent of violence against bats but also campaigned against traditional superstitions and religious beliefs, and even took a modern scientific approach to education.
Popularisation of bats to improve ecological services
Eight of the pieces that presented the benefits of bats as part of a scientific popularisation effort appeared in En Patufet (22%), seven in El Diluvio, seven in La Vanguardia (19%), and four each in El Camarada and La Pagesia (11%; Table 3). The results are evenly balanced between those written in Catalan (47%) and Spanish (53%); left-wing (44%) and right-wing (56%), and children’s magazines (39%), satirical magazines (32%) and newspapers (29%) (Table 2).
In La Vanguardia, the lawyer, amateur ornithologist, member of the Catholic led Catalan Institution for Natural History and science populariser Emili Tarré (1899, 1911) authored an article titled ‘Los Murciélagos y la Agricultura en Europa’ [Bats and Agriculture in Europe]. Tarré’s view of bats was very different from what has been described thus far. He presented a much more accurate description of them, considered different bat species and quoted foreign scientists and their work to support his statements, including the German zoologist and popular science writer Alfred Brehm (1880), whose illustrated natural history encyclopaedia Brehm’s Life of Animals was a huge success worldwide. Tarré also cited the Irish army surgeon, photographer and zoologist George Edward Dobson, who published the Catalogue of the Chiroptera in the Collection of the British Museum, which appeared in 1878 and became the standard reference on the classification of bats (Wikipedia Contributors, 2020). Tarré also described, according to the available knowledge, some of the anatomical and ethological characteristics of bats and their echolocation. According to Tarré, bats found their way around ‘through their wings’, which have ‘admirable sensitivity’ as verified by an experiment by the German zoologist Johann Heinrich Blasius, in which a blindfolded bat was released in a dark room containing thin threads that would break with the minimum contact. Tarré (1899) was surprised to observe that the threads ‘were found in the exact same position after the animal fluttered around them!’. For Tarré, there was no such thing as the apparent ‘ugliness’ of bats, since ugliness ‘could be in a particular individual’, in what he called ‘monsters’, ‘but not in a species. Bats are not monsters: bats have the appropriate means to chase and capture nocturnal flying insects, and therefore they have their own beauty’ (Tarré, 1899).
Tarré published similar articles that were more centred on the benefits for agriculture, for instance, in La Pagesia, a magazine published by the Catalan Agricultural Institute Sant Isidro which was ‘in constant liaison with landowners and farmers, from whom it received observations, news and queries, and was therefore the defender of rural interests’ (Givanel, 1937: 190). In an article from a series entitled ‘The defenders of our crops’, Tarré described how different bat species present in Catalonia prevented ‘winged nocturnal insects from laying their eggs on plants in the orchards’. According to Tarré, ‘without bats, a large number of caterpillars’ would eat ‘flowers, fruits, leaves and tender shoots’. Tarré (1895) finished his article by warning farmers that ‘if there’s a bat living somewhere in your house, let it be. Forget old beliefs that bats bring bad omens because he is a friend that serves your interests’.
An article in El Diluvio, a left-wing anticlerical periodical (Pich, 2003), described an experience in San Antonio in the United States of America where bats were used to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Based on the research performed by a scientist called Charles A. Campbell, the article asserted that a bat could eat 500 insects in one night (Murphy, 1989). Campbell proposed the creation of huge pyramid-shaped bat refuges. Just 1 year after the first refuge was opened, it was occupied by 500,000 bats that, according to the article, were a ‘hecatomb’ for mosquitoes. The article highlighted the economic benefits of bats, whereby they ‘clear’ the area of mosquitoes and, at the same time, ‘transform’ them into guano (Anonymous, 1913, 1916).
El Diluvio also published an article by the well-known and respected Spanish zoologist Ángel Cabrera entitled ‘Flesh and Blood Vampires’, which dealt with the hematophagous bats of South America. A specialist in mammals, Cabrera worked for years at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid and even wrote a book on Iberian bats (Bond, 1998; Cabrera, 1904). In the article, he explained that vampires were not ‘huge animals, and neither do they look terrible’. He provided a considerable amount of anatomical details, including ‘the enormous sickle-shaped teeth, sharp like razor blades, and fangs that work like scissors’. He precisely described how these ‘vampires’ suck (or, more precisely, lick) cows and horses. The article also describes how these animals were first encountered by European ‘conquerors’, but for many years, people doubted their existence. Cabrera (1910) also described how later ‘the first time a bat as big as a pigeon and with a horrible dog-face arrived in Spain, everybody thought it was a vampire’. But ‘it turned out that the bat did not come from America, but from India, and it ate fruit’.
Cabrera explored the public perception of vampire bats, a very morbid but also highly appealing topic of popular culture at the time, but did so in a moderate tone, not only providing detailed descriptions of bat characteristics but also explaining how the negative and exaggerated views of bats had been created and transformed over time. This article is a clear example of the more mature and scientific approach to science popularisation of the early twentieth century in Spain (González-Silva and Herran, 2009; Jiménez-Landi, 2010).
Several popular science articles that appeared in Barcelona’s public sphere in this period placed special emphasis on the ecological services provided by bats. These pieces were often written by popularisers like Tarré or Cabrera, who had international connections with well-informed experts. This brief review also reveals how, in a multiplicity of publications, the characteristics of the discourse on the usefulness of bats circulating in the media were adapted differently depending on their target audience, which ranged from children to farmers, and from conservatives to liberals.
4. Conclusion
The analysis of these articles shows how representations of bats went well beyond the actual animal, with it appearing in the city’s cultural and political spheres with different meanings attached. Bats were known in Barcelona’s ‘public sphere’ as a symbol of the city and the Catalanist political view which periodicals used as a metaphor for the city and for this specific political ideology. An in-depth study of how bats came to symbolise Catalanism would be necessary and valuable to provide further insight into perceptions of bats in Catalonia in different periods. Likewise, the idea of bats being a negative force was strong among the population and was often used in press articles of different categories. The analysis also shows how Catholicism was a strong driving force behind these negative views. The way children’s’ magazines tackled the issue of bat killings was characterised by the transmission of information from an authoritarian figure to a passive subject. However, while En Patufet’s approach was predominantly moralist, in El Camarada a more sceptical and scientific orientation can be detected, which can be connected to the appearance of a more informed popular view of the role of bat populations, as described in the final subsection.
Hence, a great deal of the selected articles (e.g. religious or moralist) could be described as adhering to a patronising, top-down model of science communication and ecological awareness (Hilgartner, 1990). However, some of the articles in the last two sections could be characterised in terms of a more scientifically aware popularisation that highlighted the role of bats as pest controllers and guano providers and sought to remove the negative stigma drawn from religious perceptions and beliefs rooted in tradition. The popularised campaign against bat killings and the highlighting of the economic benefits provided by bats show how a group of periodicals was to some extent promoting the agenda of a more ‘contextual’ form of science popularisation, which still functioned top-down from experts to laypeople, but was providing specific knowledge to what was considered to be a better informed audience. This approach also addressed the practices and concerns of the public (Brossard and Lewenstein, 2010). All this evidence suggests that this study, like similar work in the past, could be the first step towards an understanding of the complexities of scientific popularisation in the Barcelona of that period, showing how it was more concerned with public practices and concerns than has been previously acknowledged (González-Silva and Herran, 2009). In addition, it could be considered a first step towards a more democratic view of popularisation that benefits specific scientific content and improves perceptions of and attitudes to natural history (Brossard and Lewenstein, 2010; Jasanoff, 2012).
However, despite the promotion of the benefits provided by bats being the focus of a significant number of the selected articles, more than a 100 years later, these notions have still not been fully absorbed by the population, and researchers are still trying to engage the public in bat conservation (see Table 3; Kross et al., 2017; O’Shea et al., 2016). Beyond the idea behind the hackneyed quote, attributed to many, that ‘those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it’, this article hopes to contribute to a reduction in bat culling and to improve bat conservation awareness through an understanding of the history of both phenomena. Much work needs to be done to appreciate how historical research could support the contemporary agenda, but in science popularisation today, greater awareness of the role of bat populations in social practices, concerns, traditions and local knowledge appears to be essential to improve perceptions of this animal (Kingston, 2016).
Moreover, this analysis has described the role of the ideological and historical context in the construction of popular perceptions of the role of bat populations. As science studies scholarship acknowledged, in order to dispel the increasing distrust in, and even denial of, science with regard to topics such as vaccination or climate change, we must consider today’s ideological and political contexts (for instance, Oreskes, 2019). Therefore, to improve today attitudes to bats and general ecological awareness, we must understand and acknowledge not only the political and social implications of today’s interaction between science and society but also the specific contexts of each of these interactions. At the same time, it seems imperative for these non-expert publics to participate to some extent in this interaction and even in decision-making process. At a time when the public image of bats has been altered by the suggestion that they carried the disease that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, a historic understanding of science communication and public perceptions and beliefs about bats may not only be useful and informative, but also essential.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper would not have been possible without the proposal, revisions and support of Adrià López-Baucells, a professional bat researcher. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers, who had improved greatly my paper; colleagues at the Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers who teach me about bats and other forms of wildlife; Mike Roberts for his accurate language revision; Agustí Nieto-Galan for his academic and funding support; and Clara for being there, for discussion.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: ‘ICREA Acadèmia’ research prize, 2018-Agustí Nieto-Galan.
