I still feel like Applejack was in the right here

Avoids drama in the comic  
Acquire drama in the comments  
Btw that would be a good ending

@Millennial Dan  
If you want to continue arguing, I’ll put my best foot foreword for the sake of debate. I just highly doubt either of us will make any leeway.

@Nukechaser  
And here I thought you were attempting to be reasonable. So much for that.

@Mayojar77  
Maybe we should just stop. It’s probably not worth it, I highly doubt he’s going to give up despite no matter how much evidence, and addressing every single one of his points in multi-paragraph long rebuttals has completely assassinated my interest and patience with this argument.

@Nukechaser  
AS evidence to support the explosive feeding theory, A vampire bat must consume blood constantly for the majority of their waking hours, otherwise they will die of starvation. Vampire fruit bats have a similar feeding mechanism, and the majority of the time they are on screen, they are in the process of stripping another tree of it’s fruit. They are also active during the day as well as at night. They are also easily five times the size of a Vampire Bat (Vampire Bats being a microbat species).  
In as little as 20 minutes, a vampire bat can consume half it’s bodywieght in blood (they weigh around 40 grams). An apple has very little fluid in it, meaning that if we assume their energy requirements are proportional (which they aren’t; it takes far more energy to lift a 4 kilo bag of sugar than it does to lift a 40 gram bag) and assume that blood and apple juice have similar nutritional values (which they don’t; Blood has far more available nutrients than apple juice), then that means that in one sitting, a Vampire Fruit Bat can consume nearly 2 litres of apple juice in a single sitting.
 
Even a small number of Vampire Fruit Bats would be consuming far more produce than would be an acceptable loss in just a few days.

@Millennial Dan  
Except there are repeated shots where literally every tree in the background is completely destroyed. If there are only enough bats to fill a tree (which is a lot more than you might think– ever seen a tree filled with bats? I have), then it follows that yes, they can consume large amounts of apples very, very quickly. And yes, we do know how long it took– the entire episode takes place over the course of a day– it’s actually one of few episodes where chronology is easy to establish. At no point are the episode writers going to give us statistics, but it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to infer. And then there’s the precedent where a vampire fruit bat infestation had a measurable effect on the orchard, to the point that it significantly effected yield and income. Even assuming circumstances were different, it’s a reasonable precaution to want to get rid of the pests as soon as possible. If you try to misinterpret the circumstances to the point where the threat becomes completely marginalized, it doesn’t work as an episode– obviously the conflict needs to be compelling, and everything in the episode showed that it was.
 
And Fluttershy’s proposition does sound ridiculous at face value- sure, it actually worked in the end (it wouldn’t in any realistic scenario but we’ll ignore that), but you really cannot blame Applejack or the rest of the mane six for dismissing it. Fluttershy, despite being an animal expert, admits that she doesn’t know a whole lot about them beyond that they spit seeds, and has never seen one before– in fact, they’re hostile towards her despite her being gifted with dealing with almost every other kind of animal. They also directly attack Rarity– overall, that doesn’t really garner a whole lot of sympathy on their part. Fluttershy’s solution works in the end, but you can’t turn the episode summary into “Fluttershy was right and all of her friends were just completely ignorant for not listening to her in the beginning” because she made a very poor argument for her proposition, one that consisted mostly of trying to get her friends to sympathize with the bats, when Applejack made an argument that cited practicality.
 
I’m not just ranting, and I’m not ignoring the fact that she ended up being right. I’m saying her argument for it wasn’t compelling, and any reasonable person/pony would not be accountable for dismissing it outright. Which they do. Honestly, I thought it was a stupid episode– I wanted Fluttershy to have a better argument and a more compelling conflict that showed her character and flaws, but as it was, it just seemed like an excuse to randomly turn her into a bat.

>it only took half of a day for them to destroy large sections of the orchard  
That’s just it, we don’t know how many apples were consumed, whether or not the trees were permanently damaged in some way, or even how long it took for them to accomplish what we sort of saw. Everything was left pretty vague overall.
 
>it’s shown that there are a great amount of bats  
Only enough to fill one tree, as it turns out.
 
>it takes less than two seconds for one bat to eat an apple  
We don’t know how many apples they eat a day, but there isn’t much solid information to support the idea that one little handful of bats could go truly devastate the thousands upon thousands of apples they have in the orchard.
 
>Applejack is the element of honesty  
No, she is was the bearer of the Element of Honesty, but she’s stretched the truth and told outright lies on several occasions.
 
As to the rest of your points, I could answer them too, but when I see this kind of thing:

I can’t help but think you sound like just another ranter who ignores the fact that Fluttershy was right. Circumstances could have been vastly different back when Granny Smith’s story occurred. Again, since she wasn’t present, many details are missing. This isn’t a matter of Fluttershy’s ignorance, since she apparently knew what she was talking about. This is entirely about the ignorance of the audience.

@Millennial Dan  
At what point wasn’t it shown in the episode? The point where it only took half of a day for them to destroy large sections of the orchard, as seen on screen? The point where it’s shown that there are a great amount of bats, and it takes less than two seconds for one bat to eat an apple, also seen on screen? These aren’t rhetorical questions, if you can prove that they weren’t posing a very legitimate threat to the orchard, you’ve won the argument as far as I’m concerned.
 
And as far as Applejack quoting granny smith, I’d be inclined to believe you, except Applejack is the element of honesty and also is pretty specific about the fact that the had to ration their food, and didn’t have enough surplus to make cider, which is a major source of income for her family. So yeah, if I were having my livelihood threatened, and somepony suggested that I waste time building a sanctuary for the thing that’s destroying my livelihood, it would sound completely goddamn ridiculous. Which it does, to everyone except Fluttershy, who is probably doing her best to come up with a solution that works for everyone without realizing how untenable it sounds.

@Nukechaser  
>they clearly had an enormous effect on the orchard in a very short time  
That is actually not conclusively shown at any point in the episode.
 
>Applejack implies that granny smith is the only one who remembers the last time there were fruit bats, and also has a precedent for what happens when they attack an orchard  
Suspiciously, this was all second-hand information, and may have been as exaggerated as her accusations regarding the temperament of the bats.
 
>The central conflict kind of got completely overshadowed by Fluttershy randomly turning into a bat  
This much I’ll agree with. It’s very likely the writers didn’t think everyone would demand the all the little details that they ended up wanting, in order to fully understand the situation. The staff assumed that the audience would simply take everything at face value, the way they intended the story to be taken. That’s why I’ve never really tried to say that the story was written in an airtight way, I only take issue with the crazy conclusions some have drawn about Fluttershy herself, such as this idea that she doesn’t care about AJ or her livelihood.

@Nukechaser  
It reflects their respective views on the bats.
 
Fluttershy sees pokemon, Applejack sees monsters.

@Millennial Dan  
Whether or not they’re invasive, the clearly had an enormous effect on the orchard in a very short time. And it doesn’t seem to me like Vampire Fruit Bats are a common thing– Applejack implies that granny smith is the only one who remembers the last time there were fruit bats, and also has a precedent for what happens when they attack an orchard. I dunno, the end of this episode seemed too tidy for me, given the circumstances. The central conflict kind of got completely overshadowed by Fluttershy randomly turning into a bat.
 
Also, why are there, like, two kinds of vampire fruit bat? Like when fluttershy sings her part of the song they’re friendly as can be, and then when AJ sings hers they’re nightmare fuel. Was that just supposed to be metaphorical representation or something?

@HJSDGCE  
yeah, the only southern person thinks there a drain on her reasourses and wants them exterminated

@ertyuiopsnake  
Wow…

Clearly the bats represented mexican immigrants.  
think about it…

@Mayojar77  
>they don’t exactly follow the same rules as the animals around Ponyville  
You have absolutely no evidence to support that.
 
>it is outright stated they are not native to the area  
No, it was not.
 
>you keep ignoring that earlier the bats were essentially stripping the trees clean, yet by the end of the episode, they still had some trees to care for.  
It’s almost as if the threat were entirely overstated. How about that.
 
>Twilight could only remove all the urges from the bats when they were all present and affected by the stare  
And yet, by the end it’s obviously not in effect anymore. This can be because:  

@Millennial Dan  
They are clearly invasive, as it is outright stated they are not native to the area, so they don’t exactly follow the same rules as the animals around Ponyville.
 
Add to that, you keep ignoring that earlier the bats were essentially stripping the trees clean, yet by the end of the episode, they still had some trees to care for. Add to that, Twilight could only remove all the urges from the bats when they were all present and affected by the stare, yet at the end of the episode, they didn’t have all the bats in one place, so it’s pretty evident that the bats didn’t get their apple-hunger back.
 
And here’s the thing, I actually know what regular fruit bats from our world can do to an entire orchard in only a few months. These are vampire fruit bats, which have the same diet as a regular fruit bat, but the feeding habits of a vampire bat. Vampire bats routinely gorge themselves to the point where they become immobile. Fruit bats (and accessorily, vampire fruit bats) have wingspans as long as a man’s arm. Put those two traits together, and that’s several litres per bat. And there isn’t all that much juice in one apple. They can easily ruin all the harvestable apples in an orchard in a very very short time.

@Mayojar77  
Alright, look. As our anonymous friend said earlier, not only did Fluttershy indicate that the bats would continue sucking on some of the apples, Applejack herself confirmed it to be so. You are basically insisting that both of them had no idea what they were talking about, and that the sanctuary they had just constructed was meaningless since the bats wouldn’t feed on the apples within it. You try to cite real world scenarios as your only support. It doesn’t add up.
 
You talk about them being an invasive pest even though it was never established that the vampire fruit bats were “invasive” at all. You talk about them as being wild animals akin to those of our world. Guess what? We don’t have to tell birds where to go for the winter. We don’t have to wake up hibernating animals in spring. We don’t have to teach baby chicks how to fly, or do all the fishing for non-captive weasels. We don’t chum around with wild grizzlies. In summary, your comparisons have no meaning.

@Millennial Dan  
They are wild animals, and an invasive species, not pets or cattle. Saying that they are a good thing goes against everything I know about agriculture, and about actual fruit bat and vampire bat feeding behaviour. Neither one is known for not gorging themselves silly.

@Mayojar77  
In this case, the answer is obviously YES, that is EXACTLY what they concluded in the end in this episode. Carefully managed, the bats apparently had a net positive effect, which isn’t so foreign a concept to farming as you want everyone to think.

@Millennial Dan  
AGRICULTURE DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY! Are you honestly thinking that keeping a pest that feeds on the farm’s money crop on the specific farm is in any way a good thing?

@Mayojar77  
What I’m saying, and have been saying for months now, is that in regards to this story, all you’ve done is try to rewrite what actually happened. Being a farmer sure doesn’t make anyone right all the time, and in this case, Fluttershy proposed what proved to be a reasonable solution. Like I’ve said a hundred times, the most you can do is whine to the writers about the way their world operates, but Fluttershy herself did nothing wrong.
 
 
@Princess♠Molestia  
I guess. Mayo has trouble admitting that he’s guilty of some incredibly wild and untenable eisigesis, so we just keep going in circles.

 
Now we just have to deal with the Xenomorphs in the other orchard.
 
 
Also. Sweet Gravy On a Biscuit, Batman! You guys are dedicated.

@Millennial Dan  
Are you going to ignore the fact that you’re essentially saying it’s wrong for a farmer to try to not go out of business because of a pest problem? Because that’s what it seems like.

@Mayojar77  
At the end of the day, none of what you’re saying was ever intended by the show’s creators and you know it. It’s all contrivance and distortion with you.