A stray cat on the grounds of a housing estate in Singapore. Cats became legal in public housing in September.

A Messy Problem in Orderly Singapore: Keeping Track of Cats

The reversal of a 35-year ban on cats in public housing won’t be a quick fix for cat-related problems. It’s not even clear how many cats live in the city-state.

by · NY Times

Xinderella the foster cat has a microchip, a human guardian and a stable home, but she lives in a state of regulatory limbo. Under murky new rules governing cats in Singapore’s public housing, she is not registered to the apartment where she sleeps.

The plucky, three-legged tabby is one of an unknown number of cats that recently became legal to keep as pets in Singapore, where more than four in five residents live in public housing. The reversal of a 35-year ban on cats in public housing apartments that went into effect this year was a big deal for cat people who had been quietly breaking the rules for decades.

The new rules are thin on details, at least by the standards of a wealthy city-state of about six million people that prides itself on order and efficiency.

Singapore has a thicket of ordinances and punishments, including heavy fines for littering and other minor infractions, and it imposes the death penalty for marijuana trafficking. But the government has not said how it plans to enforce the new cat rules nor penalize cat owners who disobey them. It has also not specified how it will regulate foster cats like Xinderella.

“All of us are navigating through a lot of question marks,” Xinderella’s foster parent, Kartika Angkawijaya, said recently in her bright-pink public housing block. “Xin,” a one-year-old “narcissist” — she doesn’t get along with her four feline housemates — was pacing in a cage.

Even if the rules are expanded and clarified, animal-welfare advocates say they probably won’t be a quick fix for several cat-related problems, including abandonments that drive the population of strays on public housing estates, and safety lapses that have allowed some cats to fall to their deaths.

Many Singaporeans let their cats roam without sterilizing them, and kittens are sometimes dumped on the street. The burden of care often falls to low-income volunteers on the public housing estates.

Animal advocates say mandatory sterilization would alleviate those pressures, but the government worries that it could deter owners from licensing cats. Officials say they are focused for now on incentivizing voluntary sterilization and on expanding a program that has sterilized and microchipped strays since 2011.

But exactly how Singapore will amend or enforce its new cat rules remains unclear.

“It’s just so many stakeholders you have to take into consideration,” said Dr. Anna Wong, one of the Singaporean officials overseeing the new Cat Management Framework. “Cat owners, but also people who don’t like cats, people who are scared of cats. And also welfare groups, low-income households.”

No one knows how many cats live in Singapore. Registration for domestic cats opened when the new rules took effect in September. The government says there are an estimated 13,000 “free-roaming” cats in publicly accessible ground-level areas, a figure that could increase with more surveys.

Strays are so ubiquitous that volunteers fan out across the city-state to feed them.

One volunteer, Norfizah Kassim, said that she had fed dozens of strays every night for about three years, at a monthly cost of about 700 Singapore dollars, or $533. She said her attachment to the cats had grown over time.

“First it was one case, and then we got close to them,” she said on a recent evening, as she loaded a pickup truck with cat food.

The number of cats on the streets is anyone’s guess. What’s clear is that caring for them takes a toll on volunteers, some of whom “don’t know where to draw the line,” said Shelby Doshi, who investigates abandonments by following leads and knocking on doors.

“We’re all a bunch of bleeding hearts,” Ms. Doshi said in the public housing apartment she shares with several ailing rescue cats.

Singapore’s cat-related social problems emerged after the government began moving residents into public housing in the 1960s. It banned cats on public estates in 1989, saying that they were “generally difficult to contain” in apartments.

Singapore’s approach to animal welfare has since improved drastically, and officials are getting a better picture of its cat-related problems, said Dr. Yeumee Song, the country manager at Pet Space Singapore, a veterinary clinic.

“They’re recognizing that there is this undisclosed population of animals that they just have no information on,” she said.

(Singapore’s dog regulations are farther along. Up to one dog, from a list of approved breeds, is allowed in each public housing unit. And the government said last year that more than 4,000 “free-roaming” dogs, or about 80 percent of the estimated stray canine population, had been sterilized since 2018.)

Under the new cat rules, each public housing unit will be allowed to have up to two cats — with a grandfather clause for cats already housed there, like Xinderella and her housemates, as long as they are registered within a two-year transition period.

But gray areas remain. What happens if you moved in with your partner and you each have multiple cats? And do foster cats count toward a household’s two-cat quota? (Xinderella is registered not to her fosterer but to the person who rescued her.)

Advocates also worry that animal abuse, either by owners or their anti-cat neighbors, could rise as it becomes easier to own a cat. And because the new rules do not require would-be owners to cat-proof their apartments as a condition for licensing the animals, there are concerns that more cats could fall to their deaths from public housing high rises.

There is also the thorny question of how the government will ensure that cat people follow the rules.

Dr. Wong, of the Animal and Veterinary Service, said officials would not “actively go out and catch people” for cat-related violations during the two-year transition. She said the government is still gathering public feedback.

It’s already clear that cat-related enforcement in Singapore is administratively complex, said Kerstin Schulze, who runs a local cat hotel and works for a charity that supports low-income cat feeders. She said that before officials enter apartments to look for dead or abandoned cats, they often have long debates about which agency has the jurisdiction to do so.

“Actually going into flats, seizing cats?” Ms. Schulze said. “That’s been very messy.”

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