People eat the most bizarre things possible. From cockroaches, snakes, to even bats. A village Baan Toom, in Thailand, where average income is barely $72, hunts for bats and eats them. They claim the meat is delicious and also good for their libido.

Since their income is not much, villagers say that there is abundance of free food available. Besides working in the paddy fields, lot of them engage in bat-hunting, a tradition that has been going on for very long.

Villagers grab a net and long poles and go bat hunting. It takes them just few minutes to hunt these mouse bats, which are quite tiny, from their regular hangouts – sugar palm trees.

The farmers crash poles into the trees and bats tumble down into the waiting net. Its not hard to catch them, they just fall right into the laid trap. Before laying the trap, the hunter will say a magic chant in the local dialect, asking the bats’ forgiveness for what awaits them. Now what follows is rather brutal. The bats are thrown into boiling water, once dead, the fur is plucked off. Then they roasted on charcoal fire, along with their wings, guts etc. The minced meat is mixed with fresh herbs, a little sugar and spicy paste and then fried. The older generation loves to eat bats, in spite of knowing that carry diseases like rabies. One the villager says, “They do wonders for your libido and they give you stamina. And if you have them with traditional medicine, they boost your performance.”

But the younger generation detest the idea of eating bats, they find it weird to dig in a bowl of bat meat. While the older ones hunt as many as 200 bats a day, and at other times only half dozen.

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Tags: Bizarre rituals, Eating Bats, Thailand