Bats often get the short end of the stick—when you look around in October, they’re featured in Halloween decorations right up there with unsavory characters like monsters and ghosts. But these animals are key to their environments as pollinators, dispersers of seeds, and insect-eaters. Plus, in the case of flying fox fruit bats, they have faces that even a bat-hating chiroptophobe could love—they look like German shepherd puppies with wings.