People would never choose the bird over not paying rent for nothing, especially because the people doing this trick would not be the one’s with a lot of money.

Here in The Netherlands, bats are protected. Bats nest in the ventilated outside walls of houses. According to law, if you want to insulate your walls and it is suspected you have bats, you now need to pay an inspector €3000-6000 just to check. If you do have bats, they need to be lured out and re-nested with another expensive operation. What people do instead is flush their walls with low grade toxins so the bats get scared off.