Hashtag Flying Fox

Hashtag Flying Fox
—‘It’s always Halloween in Australia’
Celeste Lawson & Mike Danaher

"By focusing on almost a century of human attitudes and behaviours towards camps of flying foxes, this paper reveals some insights into why some humans continue to have difficulty co-existing with flying foxes. Employing a multidisciplinary approach bringing environmental history and media studies together, the paper further explores the potential of new media—specifically Twitter—to promote more positive perceptions of flying foxes. Firstly the paper contextualizes the discourse around flying foxes and humans by briefly exploring the history of the battle between horticulturists and flying foxes, and later the resistance by some humans in accepting flying fox colonies camping in urban centres, mainly because of perceived health risks. The paper then examines 496 Twitter conversations from 2015, using the hashtag #flyingfox, in order to gauge current public feeling towards flying foxes, revealing the potential of this form of new media to educate and inform the public with regards to giving the animal a more positive perception in our human-animal relations. This study concludes through our Twitter analysis that there is significant sentiment for the conservation of flying foxes developing in the community, and that there are opportunities for positive attitudes towards flying foxes to be established and deepened via this new media platform."

There were 258 unique Twitter accounts that used the hashtag #flyingfox. Although the vast majority of these users only tweeted once using the hashtag, one Twitter user in particular was prolific under the hashtag #flyingfox (@bats_rule), generating 140 original tweets which were often then retweeted by his followers.

The dominant Twitter user of #flyingfox was @bats_rule. His profile revealed that he is a wildlife conservationist with 332 followers. During the 20 weeks the tweets were analysed, @bats_rule tweeted 140 times using the hashtag #flyingfox. During the analysis period, his tweets were retweeted 86 times—especially tweets with photos, including one of a mother and baby flying fox being rescued from a barbed wire fence, and ongoing photos of Johnny Depp’s adopted flying fox. @bats_rule has some 4,280 photos and videos on his profile. @bats_rule also always only tweeted positive posts relating to conservation. He has a high rate of retweets. @bats_rule was regularly sending out messages relating to flying fox conservation, the posts were one-sided and did not involve replies from his followers. Still, due to the volume of retweets, it is evident that his posts were welcomed by his followers and have a wide reach.

"Colonial Australia’s history of having difficulty co-existing with flying foxes has allegedly led to weaknesses in the current approach to the management of flying fox colonies as adopted by Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection. Lack of understanding of the ecological usefulness and the vulnerability of flying foxes, coupled with the nature of the problems they cause humans, led to them being maligned by segments of the local community. The distribution of clearer information about the ecological roles of flying foxes could be useful as a basis on which to construct counter-narratives about flying foxes. Furthermore, new media, given their capacities for information distribution and for the sharing of affective states, might have a role to play in helping the public better understand flying foxes and their roles in nature, especially with regards to those colonies located in urban areas."

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"There was a widespread attitude across rural Australia during the 19th century and much of the 20th century that was almost war-like. The ‘Fauna War’, as it was infamously known in hindsight, with native birds and marsupials seen as the enemy of the farmers, was a reflection of Europeans perceiving Australian native animals from the second half of the 19th century as pests, and killing them in very large numbers."

"Bill Thorpe refers, for example, to a ‘Fauna War’ of the late 1800s in rural Queensland, backed by the Marsupials Destruction Bill 1877, where pastoralists killed large numbers of the kangaroos, wallabies and other marsupials that competed with their sheep, cattle and horses for grass, and which ate their crops."

"The killing of ‘greedy’ marsupials extended to the killing of native birds, flying foxes and reptiles as well, or, as Marshall graphically puts it, ‘savagely butchering every koala, paddymelon, bilby and bustard’."

"Thorpe says that the justification of this hunting is linked back to two deeply held beliefs among transplanted British ‘gentlemen’: the right of the aristocracy and gentry to hunt without hindrance in Britain; and members of Acclimatization Societies believing that native Australian fauna were inferior to imported species and really had no economic value."

"This belief that native fauna were inferior to exotic species, a form of biological cringe, is almost inverted today, demonstrated by legislation that condemns introduced biota and sanctifies most native biota."

"The flying fox is also still much maligned in some communities in Australia for various reasons, including their raids on orchards, their ‘risk’ to human health, and their smell and noise. In short they are considered a ‘conflict’ species because situations bring them into conflict with people."