Bat poop is associated with COVID-19, Ebola, and Marburg viruses.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
27 points (81.4% liked)
No Stupid Questions
41560 readers
770 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
nasty
Bat shit is pretty toxic, and while individual poo is small, bat colonies are absolutely massive and the shit literally piles up as up to millions of bats poop in the same place night after night.
Iirc, the phrase "bat shit crazy" comes from the harvesting of tropical bat guano (poop) for use as a fertliser. The poop is highly toxic, or contains toxic bacteria, which makes the harvesters go a little crazy! Not all bat species have this toxic poop.
:0
Bullshit is meaningless talk or meaningless tasks.
Horseshit is a falsehood.
Batshit is crazy or deranged.
Dogshit is something low-quality.
Apeshit is out of control angry or excited
Chickenshit means "contemptible."
Calling someone cowardly was my understanding of chickenshit.
Cowardice is indeed worthy of contempt.
Judge: “I sentence @Nemo@midwest.social to life in jail for making a comment on the internet.”
You: “That’s some bullshit”
Judge: “yes, I agree that’s just meaningless talk”
Okay, meaningless or spurious.
I would suggest “without good cause” instead of “without meaning”. Related for sure… things without good cause can often have no purpose. But I think it’s the lack of just cause that makes it BS to begin with.
Going to make it a priority to introduce the poo of other animals into my vernacular.
“Did you see that performance last night? Absolutely yakshit!”
I mean... It's poop. Why would there be positive connotations? lol
but why specifically horses, bulls, and bats?
The bat shit I've run across is absolutely the worst smelling thing I've ever run across. Similar experience to a rotting whale carcass
ah the smell, that makes sense. Never been near bats so I didn’t know about that!
Horses, because they used to be everywhere. Step in the street, and you were likely to step in some.
Bull, because it’s very big and smelly and there was usually some around (steer manure is still prized for gardening).
Bats… because it rains from above and is really gross, and you’ve got a high likelihood of getting really sick from it.
Why we don’t go on about pigeon and seagull guano though? I have no idea.
Man that's some straight gullshit.
That doesn't sound half as pigeon-shitty as I expected.
Horses and bulls make more sense, English is a quite an old language. The diseases from bat poo sound nasty.
Why we don’t go on about pigeon and seagull guano though? I have no idea.
Mammallist birdshit.
shit sucks
It isn't just those, but horses and bulls have the biggest poops most people will ever see. So using them as reference for giant piles of unpleasant things makes sense.
Now, batshit? For one, have you ever been near where bats stay? The smell is so fucking intense.
But, bats are also known to flit around in a way that's erratic when you rarely see their entire flight path. So they have a reputation for being less predictable, or a little crazy. At least that's my understanding of how bats got referenced for someone being easily distracted, weird, or crazy. You know, "that old lady is a little batty, so don't be surprised if she forgets to pay you", or "that dude has bats in his belfry".
How that got linked too batshit, I'm not certain. Back when I looked it up, the sources we have now didn't exist., which ima go look the etymology of it up and see if there's something newer to me. If there is, I'll come back.
Nah, nothing new. Only thing that I saw this time was batshit probably coming more as a variant of bullshit, with a similar meaning, and then getting tangled up with the idea of being batty. So, in terms of how it would be used, a crazy person isn't bullshitting because they think what they're spewing is true, so it's batshit instead.
Also, I noticed apeshit out there as well. Meaning to lose one's shit in a violent way. Which, apes tend to look like they're going apeshit as a dominance/threat display, but tend to not carry through as often as humans do
I was taught that bat shit (guano) is toxic to humans in ways that can make the person “go crazy” before they die. Similar to mercury poisoning and being a “mad hatter” from the days of mercury lined headwear.
Yes I believe that's true, at least for some species. The poop is collected for use as a fertliser hence the resulting tendancy for infection.
That's probably true regarding the dangers; but as far as I've ever seen, it doesn't link to the etymology of it at all. Batty or similar things have a fairly established record. Batshit is less than a hundred years old as a term for crazy, and has solid origins in print that aren't related to that.
Bat and bird poop can carry diseases such as histoplasmosis.
I love cow dung smell (when it's not too much of it) - it reminds me of childhood, summer, riding my bike through the fields, etc. Rural stuff.
Now, pig and chicken shit are smelling terribly