> bat it's a useless cat. Cat concatenates files. ANSI colour breaks that.

From the README:

>Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e. when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents

bat works as normal cat for normal uses of cat and a better cat for all those "useless cat" situations we find ourselves in.