A Messy Problem in Orderly Singapore: Keeping Track of Cats

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.