It has been an accepted fact in the scientific community that almost 70 per cent of all sounds made by bats are to bicker with other bats. But now Yossi Yovel and colleagues at the University of Tel Aviv have discovered that the shrill cries of bats, which so often pass into ultrasonic, are filled with a lot of information. Harnessing machine learning algorithms originally used for human voice recognition, they were able to decode that bats are shrill, but that does not mean they are unreasonable. There is still hope for those of you who cannot argue without keeping your voice down.