Seeing a bat flying at night, who among us truly thinks, “There is a creature that eats 8,000 mosquitoes a night, and without it we’d all have died of malaria by now.” It may be safe to say that the opposite is true, that we see a bat and think illness and death, all words akin to the vampire because it has always been blamed as the carrier for such horrors.
True, bats are actually quite helpful. It's a shame we often portray them in such a negative light.