This Was Not A Fun Post To Make

This blog post is about pests.

It will have pictures of bugs and creepy crawlies.

The back-button is at the top-left.

And now that you've gotten your fair warning... To be honest, I'm not even sure why I'm blogging about this topic since it's such a common thing to me, but I guess what's common to me might be news to others, so. If you're a local reading, sorry to bore you. If you're an expat living in or visiting Singapore and you're reading this, and you haven't had the opportunity to come across these lovely creatures yet, I'd like to introduce you to...

THE COMMON COCKROACH

...it seriously is really common here. The common cockroach in Singapore can grow to as large as the size of an adult thumb, and they are near impossible to kill. You can smack them with newspaper or bugspray them and the little buggers just either reanimate, respawn, or come right back. Even better, a lot of them are apparently psychic and they'll run straight at you - instead of away from you - if you try to attack them directly.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a non-blurry picture
of a cockroach that's running toward you while you're simultaneously
running backwards away from it

Not only are roaches invincible, they're everywhere too. You'll find them scuttling between the shadows, hiding in the drains, feasting in the garbage bins, hanging from the ceiling; they even ride the bus to work with you and fly into your hair. More than once I've witnessed full-grown cockroaches creeping along the windows or poles of the public buses while riding the commute to work, and the latter happened to me only a mere week ago. (I got rid of it by doing a impromptu three second rain dance on the sidewalk and then just stared after it as it continued to lazily fly away.)

As disgusting as I've made it sound though, be rest assured that a large majority of the public buses (and Singapore in general!) are roach-free, and while they do fly roaches normally prefer to creep along flat surfaces than take to the air. Most places are regularly fumigated every couple months too, keeping the roach population in check (although the only downside to that is having to pick your way through the hundred of dead bodies carpeting the floor the next morning).

And next up is...

COMMON HOUSE LIZARD

Often found on the ceilings of bathrooms, in the corners of room ceilings, under the lights on the wall and behind the automatic kettle on the kitchen counter, the common house lizard reaches various sizes depending on how stable its diet of flies is and is also very likely the source of that weird chittering noise you hear above your head while sitting on the john. Nearly transparent, they move in short, zig-zaggish bursts of speed and may or may not drop down on you from above instead of running in the opposite direction while being chased. Young lizards can be as tiny as the first joint of your thumb and well-fed adults can reach the size of an outstretched hand (from the tip of the middle finger to the base of the palm).

They're always hiding somewhere. Always.

Some of my personal notes on house lizards: hosing them with hot water from the showerhead will not melt them through the shower stall drain, and fishing their partially liquefied bodies out after is not a pleasant task at all. Also, the tail stays alive for up to ten minutes after dropping off the body and it will somehow continue wriggling menacingly towards you even long after the lizard itself has run away.

And last but not least...

STRAY CATS

You heard me. These fuzzy little cuties are considered pests in Singapore, mostly because of the noise they make during heat and during fights, and even though the Singapore Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA) have taken measures to stop them from breeding via neutering, they somehow keep multiplying. You'll find at least one cat in the void deck of every HDB building there is in Singapore. And despite numerous signs telling the general public not to feed the strays, people still do because face it, cats are cute. (I haven't really heard of anyone getting fined for doing so though, seems like most people close an eye to it.)

You can tell if a stray cat's been fixed by looking at its ears. After it's been picked up by the SPCA, the cat in question will be dewormed, vaccinated against rabies and common diseases, and neutered before being returned to where it was found, with one small difference - a little slice of one of its ears removed. It sounds painful, but it's done while the cat is under anesthesia (with a hot metal wire, very quick and efficient) and it doesn't affect the cat's hearing at all. It's also very common for most stray cats here to have a kink in their tail or two, but not to worry because this is actually a genetic defect, and not a result of abuse during kittenhood as I had previously thought. (According to Michelle, all the cats in Ohio, USA have long straight tails. Now that was unusual to me!)

And that ends the post on pests for now. Have a kitty.