What Makes An Animal Singaporean?

Tim
I believe that Inuka and Ah Meng had a certain place in the hearts of Singaporeans, much more than those pandas that I don't even know if they're still there. But the thing is, even in the chapter, there’s an explanation of a panther named Twiggy that escaped before the zoo even opened and was wild and running around the central catchment area for a year or two before it was found and killed.

But that led to an outpouring of grief also from the public. And so the public has adopted animals you wouldn't actually think they might adopt as kind of their own and each one of them is not from Singapore. You know, the panther was from Thailand. Ah Meng was actually a former pet that had been given up in the 70s, but an orangutan from Sumatra or Borneo. Inuka was born in Singapore.

Jimmy
The only true Singaporean creature.

Tim
The only true Singaporean creature at the zoo.

Jimmy
It was a polar bear.

Tim
It was a polar bear. It’s interesting how you have migrant animals and how they adapt. You know, and it’s almost hard to determine which ones will be the popular ones in this regard.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Traveller’s tales of tasty tilapia. Kids being cool about crocodiles. A massacre of monkeys. Singaporean Creatures is a collection of essays about the relationship between humans and animals on this tiny island of ours. This relationship is often a tense one. We want a nice home with air-conditioning, and we don’t want pesky animals attempting to eat us, our garbage, or our ornamental koi. Usually, but not always, we win. Singaporean Creatures takes a historical perspective and looks at how our relationship with wild animals have changed over time.

I’m Jimmy Yap, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. With me in the studio is Tim Barnard, the editor of Singaporean Creatures, who also wrote two of the essays in this book.

Congrats on the book being shortlisted for the NUS History Prize, a very well-deserved accolade. There’s lots of great stuff to read in this book, and I’m really hoping that you guys will win. I especially like the piece that you wrote about monkeys, you know, that was quite interesting because I learnt a lot. In writing that piece, could you share with our listeners, what you found interesting in researching that piece about the relationship between humans and, especially the long-tailed macaques in Singapore?

Tim
Well, I wrote the piece with Jennifer Yip, who’s a colleague of mine in the history department. And the origin of that particular chapter actually goes back to a book I wrote earlier titled Nature’s Colony. It’s about the Singapore Botanic Gardens. And in that book, I, you know, doing research on the Botanic Gardens, came across the story of what happened to monkeys in the gardens. But it didn’t quite fit into the narrative of survey of the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

So, it wasn’t in that other book, but it was always there. Plus, I knew Jennifer and Jennifer had written a piece on what had happened to monkeys and how they’re seen in Singapore and things like that. So I talked with her about combining my own knowledge of an anecdote or a story about the gardens and her work on monkeys and we kind of put it together and wrote the chapter. But the real origin of it is this interesting story is how you can label it a massacre, you can label it an attempt to rid the gardens of monkeys, but essentially the Botanic Gardens was famous up until the early 1970s for having monkeys.

People would go there. It was a tourist attraction. Even my mother-in-law, when I was working on the original Botanic Gardens book, she would say, “Oh, are there still monkeys there?” And I was like, “No, no, they haven’t been there for 30 or 40 years.” So the chapter essentially revolves around the story of getting the monkeys out of the gardens.

Now this was done through sending the army in and people shooting the monkeys. There was then an attempt to poison the monkeys. There were all types of attempts to rid the gardens of the monkeys. And some monkeys did die. The other part of the story was that the two troops that lived in the gardens migrated to the central catchment area.

And so, within that story, you have everything from violence to where monkeys are today in Singapore, to what is the role of the Botanic Gardens, and a number of issues. But what I always found fascinating about it was this determination or the creation of boundaries, about where do we want wild animals, where do we want tame animals, what is for humans and what is not.

And essentially, when the efforts to get rid of the monkeys in the gardens in 1971, when that occurred, it was an attempt to create new boundaries. The Botanic Gardens was a park for humans. The central catchment area was a place for wild animals and so therefore it was more appropriate for the monkeys to live there.

Now that has then cropped up since the 1970s, with issues of our own building of condominiums and HDB flats closer to the central catchment area. So monkeys do come over and bother people in these estates. The development of a road such as the BKE, how it cuts through a forested area. Things of this nature have created increased chances of conflict or people entering these boundaries. But essentially the chapter is about how monkeys fit into society or eventually don’t, how they’re told to leave Singapore society, if you will, to go to an area that is wild.

Jimmy
I really found it very interesting. I mean, we do encounter monkeys in forested areas. And monkeys are obviously very hard to contain.

Tim
The other aspect of that, by the way, that was interesting to me was how much monkeys were part of society prior to the 1970s. People had monkeys as pets. They were the number two most popular pet in Singapore after dogs.

Jimmy
Number two?

Tim
Number two. In the 1930s, there was a survey done and essentially the number one pet in Singapore were dogs. But number two, it was tied between songbirds and monkeys. Cats weren’t even on the list. And so, people could go to pet shops. They could buy monkeys. You’d put them in the household. And so, in the 1970s, as part of the efforts to get rid of them in the Botanic Gardens, the government also passed legislation defining what was a pet.

Now, we think of that as whether cats can live in HDB flats, and the size of the dog, and things like that. But it also involved, classifying monkeys no longer as a pet. You could not keep a monkey in an HDB, for example. And so, the public were urged to give up their monkeys to the zoo or to NUS for other purposes.

The thing is, monkeys had been part of society and then they were, to be harsh, kicked out of society, or put on the other side of the boundary.

Jimmy
This book is very interesting because it uses animals as a lens to look at Singapore history. What comes into focus when you do that?

Tim
Well, I see myself as a historian of Singapore and the Malay world. That’s what I was trained in. That’s what I work on. And I simply use environmental tools or stories to tell that larger story. And in this case, we can think of animals almost as metaphors for larger systems of control or how society develops and modernises and how our relationship, not only as people in Singapore, but also our relationship with animals tells us a lot about how we see ourselves and how we fit into society.

I’ve written books and chapters and various things on plants in Singapore, on animals in Singapore, but it’s really about Singapore. We should almost remove the words plant or animal because I see it as giving us insight into who we are and how we fit in a society and how the relationship we all have with each other as humans, and also with society around us, the environment and other matters.

So, you may want to pick up the book because you’re interested in crocodiles or tilapia fish or monkeys or mosquitoes or something like that. But when you read the stories, they tell you a lot more about the larger society and larger issues that Singaporeans have faced basically since World War II.

Jimmy
So, that leads me to the question, what makes a creature Singaporean? How is a tilapia Singaporean, for example?

Tim
The simple answer to that would be that they are present in Singapore. Now, that might be a cheat or that might be a little bit of a quick answer, a lazy answer. But as Anthony Medrano argues in the tilapia chapter, it’s about not only their presence, but how they adapt to the environment and the landscape to the point that they then become something that plays a role in the larger society.

So, tilapia, for example, it’s a fish from Africa that was brought over during World War II by the Japanese from Java. And basically it was brought here as a fish to grow for more food. They escaped from the ponds or wherever they were kept due to heavy rains and such. And then they spread like wildfire.

You see them every day. If you look in a canal or any body of water in Singapore, you will see a tilapia fish. But it is a migrant that was not here before the early 1940s. But it is now in many respects the most dominant freshwater fish in Singapore and how it adapted to the area, how it was accepted or not accepted as a food fish, and then how it spread in a sense made it a Singaporean creature.

It is a migrant like everyone is to Singapore, practically. And so how it came in and its story reflects not only that larger migration issue, but how different creatures adapt to the environment here.

Jimmy
The book talks quite a lot about the Garden City, you know, that’s quite a theme that appears in quite a few of the essays. But there’s no one essay that actually deals with the Garden City specifically. So, you know, how would you, as the editor of this amazing book, how would you characterise the importance of the Garden City concept in shaping human-animal relationships in Singapore?

Tim
Sure. First, I would say, if you want a Garden City essay by me, there’s one in a book called Nature Contained, which is an edited volume. I wrote a chapter in that with a woman named Corinne Heng. And that one explains what the programme is. But to me, I define Garden City as the amalgamation of all the different environmental programmes we’ve had in Singapore since the 1960s, since independence. Now, I know City and Nature is the common logo. And they’ve gone through Garden City, City in a Garden, all types of greening programmes, but essentially to me, it’s the different government departments, different ministries, and their efforts to plant, to create parks, to plant trees, to green Singapore, and this involves plants, but then subsequently involves animals too.

When we think of the greening of Singapore, it’s usually just a tree or bougainvillea or orchids, and other plants. Animals come along with that, and animals are often not seen as part of the story. But everyday people have pets, they have pet dogs, they have cats, they have birds. There’s often a story in the papers about otters or wild pigs, birds you can see everywhere, uh, whether they’re good birds like songbirds or bad birds like crows or pigeons. They’re always in the news and we interact with them every day, but we often don’t see them. And so that’s one of the ways we want to just kind of think about what is a creature, but also what makes somebody Singaporean and how we fit in society and how we all interact.

The ideas behind it are to not only think about the structures of society but also to think beyond, you know. Often when you think of history, it’s kind of politics and economics and those are very important topics, but also what are the influence of those politics and economics on society? And what does it tell us about ourselves? I mean, we live on this island of 700 km². There’s six million of us in various iterations of what we are, and we all have to interact in some way. If you think about these different creatures, it gives you this insight.

Jimmy
We plant more trees, and as we start to have nature reserves and all that, we start to see a bit of rewilding, if I can call it that. So, you know, you have armadas of otters pillaging koi ponds. You have squadrons of hornbills ominously looming above us. And marauding gangs of feral chickens terrorising innocent pedestrians like me. So, I want to know, why aren’t these animals in your book? I mean, how did you pick the animals to include?

Tim
Sure. I don’t know about your background with feral chickens, but we’ll go [with it]. I contacted various authors and just said, “I’m interested in putting together a book about animals in Singaporean society. Would you like to contribute something?” So, it was entirely up to each of the authors, you know, and they would get back to me and say, “I’m interested in insects or fish or the zoo with the zoo count or various songbirds”. So, I let the authors have free reign. But one of the points of the book is that you could write about any animal.

You could write about your feral chickens. There could be a chapter on otters. That’s open, maybe Singaporean Creatures Part Two or something like that. The idea is each individual took a creature – or there’s one chapter on the aquariums and one chapter on zoos – or a place, and then discussed how these creatures represent or reflect aspects of society.

And so, while we may have left out certain creatures, I wouldn’t think of it as being left out, but opening the possibility for more to be included in the future.

Jimmy
I really am looking forward to a volume two of Singaporean Creatures, because I see feral chickens everywhere, even in Shenton Way, you can find feral chickens.

Tim
That’s true. I don’t know if they terrorise people, but maybe you got a thing against chickens. I don’t know.

Jimmy
But yeah, I think there’s lots of interesting things, like otters, wild boar. You know, you could have, lots and lots of other essays.

Tim
Oh, absolutely.

Jimmy
But talking about animals that were snubbed by you and your editorial decisions, we have to talk about otters.

Tim
Yes.

Jimmy
You know, they’ve become like really mascots for me for the rewilding of Singapore. How do they represent that relationship between humans and the natural environment?

Tim
The otters are interesting because they are a species that was extinct, or they were not found in Singapore. They were present here and then they disappeared for several decades, often due to pollution of water, urbanisation, and such issues. They made their comeback over the last 10, 15 or 20 years because of, as you said, the rewilding of Singapore, kind of the replanting, the greening, they’re almost a result of all of these Garden City programmes. Because what has occurred is things such as the cleaning up of waters, such as the Singapore River, forested areas.

And so, our current otter population migrated from Malaysia via Pulau Ubin and other places on the northern shores of Singapore. Then they multiplied. And as they created families, these families would get too big, and they would break off and create more families. We now have hundreds of otters in Singapore today.

Now, they’re cute. They’ve become a mascot. You see them everywhere and people love encountering them. I’m not as much like you are with feral chickens. I am a bit that way with otters, to be honest. I see them as a bit nasty because they do kick out members of the family and they do wander around, they do raid koi ponds and things like that. They’re definitely not tame animals. They can create a little bit of havoc in society. And therefore, I find them very interesting because they are migrants, but they’re returning migrants, if you will. They are creatures that are adorable in some respects, but they also have a nasty edge. They definitely deserve their own chapter in a future edition of the book, but we’ll see if we can get someone to write that.

Jimmy
I hope so. I just saw a video on my Facebook page of two otter gangs, like, duking it out in a river.

Tim
There you go. Creating havoc.

Jimmy
I mean, otters are really, as you say, an example of, you know, wild animals. But most of our wild animals that we encounter actually end up being in the zoo. Some of these zoo animals end up being very, very popular with Singaporeans, right? So, you have Inuka the polar bear and Ah Meng and when they died, you know, there was this outpouring of grief over these captive animals. At the same time, I think that a group of people in Singapore have become more ambiguous about zoos.

Tim
Well, they have. The interesting thing to me about the zoo – and there is a chapter on it by Choo Ruizhi, which I think is very good. And he documents essentially the origins of the zoo and even zoos prior to our current zoo, up through the death of Inuka and what that meant for society and how there was an outpouring of grief.

And what I find very interesting in the chapter is that the zoo was essentially founded by the Tourist Promotion Board working along with PUB [Public Utilities Board] because it’s up there where the reservoirs are and the central catchment area and such. And so, I would have never imagined that, until this was explained to me, it was created almost as a calculated tourist attraction. Like we needed something in Singapore for the tourists to go see and they built the zoo in the mid-70s. And it became very popular, particularly among Singaporeans. You know, not even tourists, if you will, but Singaporeans would go there.

You have various iconic animals throughout the 80s and 90s that many of us are familiar with. And it developed in that manner. And what’s interesting to me today is how this continues in its development, where it’s a very managed space. I mean, they moved the bird park. I was always a big fan of the bird park, and they moved the bird park up to the Mandai area. There’s the zoo, there’s the Night Safari, there’s the River [Wonders], there’s all the different iterations of a zoo in that area. But it’s how they’ve kind of created a central managed zone of caged animals or contained animals that you can go see and how that has been calculating. I don’t mean that in such a negative way, but it’s just been all planned out.

You don’t have to go out to Jurong for birds. You could spend all day and all night at Mandai and probably not see everything they have on display there. And so, it’s moved from an effort of a government ministry to this very managed space. And in many ways, I see that as almost reflective of larger Singaporean society and how the government oversees things.

Within that story, it’s also interesting how certain creatures are adopted and beloved in Singaporean society. I don’t want to anger panda fans out there, but I believe that Inuka and Ah Meng had a certain place in the hearts of Singaporeans, much more than those pandas that I don't even know if they're still there.

But the thing is, even in the chapter, there’s an explanation of a panther named Twiggy that escaped before the zoo even opened and was wild and running around the central catchment area for a year or two before it was found and killed. But that led to an outpouring of grief also from the public.

And so, the public has adopted animals you wouldn’t think they might adopt as kind of their own. And each one of them is not from Singapore. You know, the panther was from Thailand. Ah Meng was a former pet that had been given up in the 70s, but an orangutan from Sumatra or Borneo. Inuka was born in Singapore.

Jimmy
The only true Singaporean creature.

Tim
The only true Singaporean creature at the zoo.

Jimmy
It was a polar bear.

Tim
It was a polar bear. It’s interesting how you have migrant animals and how they’ve adapted, you know, and it’s almost hard to determine which ones will be the popular ones in this regard, or which ones people will somehow take note of. I mean, you can still go to the zoo and buy little Inuka stuffed animals, years after the passing of the bear.

Jimmy
Okay, well, Singaporean Creatures is your second anthology, is that correct?

Tim
It’s the second edited book on environmental history.

Jimmy
And you’ve also written Imperial Creatures and Nature's Colony. And you’re also a historian of the Malay world. So, I think you started off as a historian of the Malay world, and then you pivoted to environmental history. How did that happen? Why did it happen?

Tim
I was trained at the University of Hawaii, under Barbara and Leonard Andaya. As a historian of Sumatra, I studied 18th-century kingdoms and Malay texts and hikayat and shayars and such at Hawaii. I was fortunate enough to get a job at NUS [National University of Singapore]. I came to Singapore in 1999. The first decade or so I was here, I was teaching Malay history and various things like this. But I’m also curious about where I live, the society I’m part of and things like this. So, I began to do research on, I’ll say, more Singaporean topics. And so, at first it was Malay films and using them as texts to study 1950s and 1960s Singapore. I also taught for over 20 years a class called Environmental History. I was always very frustrated teaching environmental history because I would talk about larger global issues, but then I had difficulty finding readings for students to talk about in tutorials or in discussion sessions about, okay, how does this apply to Singapore? Or, you know, how can we think about Singapore in this manner?

And so, part of it is all of this coming together. Me living in Singapore, teaching environmental history, being curious about the society I live in, wanting to look at it from different angles. And so, it all comes together with what I’ve been working on pretty much for the last 10 years or so, which is plants and animals in Singapore, whether it’s the Botanic Gardens, whether it’s various the animals that lived here. So, it's my way of exploring Singaporean society.

Jimmy
I think that, you know, that makes a lot of sense.

Tim
It might not be what they paid for when they brought me in in 1999, but that’s what they got.

Jimmy
Well, I guess given the interest in green issues and sustainability, they probably got more than what they bargained for.

Tim
Also, one of the things that I’m interested in writing [about] is the way of looking at issues that I think are important to society. If we think about what’s going on in Singapore and the future. And these are not just Singaporean, but global issues. Things like biodiversity, climate change, and urban living. I mean, we live in an extremely urban landscape here. And I mean, a range of issues from providing food for ourselves, clean water, livable society. These are all issues that environmental history deals with, but also issues we face for the future.

So, if through my work, I can look at how we’ve dealt with these issues in the past, maybe we can think about, okay, what are the decisions we’re making for the future? I don’t want to play too much into that, but the idea of how with any history, we’re studying about ourselves and how we fit into society and our relationship with each other. And so, hopefully this will give us new angles or perspectives on how to do that.

Jimmy
Makes sense. As you said, you know, when you first started teaching environmental history, you didn’t have a lot of resources when it came to Singapore in particular. So how did you get around this?

Tim
One of the things that attracts me in environmental history is its diversity. The stereotype of a historian is that we go in an archive and blow off, dust off a paper, a sheet of paper and write down what it says. And environmental history, you can’t really go in an archive and say, can I have your files on cats? Because there is no file on cats!

Jimmy
There should be.

Tim
There should be, but there’s not. And so, you have to cobble together a number of different, you go to sources from geography or from biology or from anthropology and you find different sources. To me, one of the greatest things the Archives and National Library has done in the last 15 years or so is NewspaperSG.

Jimmy
Oh, that’s great.

Tim
Any sin is forgiven, because of that. So, if you go in there and you type in, just for example, “dog”, and you then say, I want all the newspaper accounts of dogs from 1860 to 1880. You can read through those and a lot of them are not useful, but what you then find is, oh my gosh, there was a rabies outbreak or some event occurred. Then, you know, okay, now I need to go look at the 1870s or 1880s in the government records. And then there might be echoes or mentions of, oh we have a lot of rabid dogs or something like that. How are we going to deal with that? And so, it's detective work. And that’s what I find interesting about it. It’s just not there. You have to cobble the narrative together. You have to patch it together and then think about, is this important or what does this tell us about the society? And so to me, it’s history research plus. You know, it allows you to go into many different disciplines. You then have to read geography. You have to read biology. Like, how do these animals live? How has it passed along? And this is where I reach outside the history department.

For example, I’m a research affiliate at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, because the people at Lee Kong Chian can help me with specimen collection or explaining the behavior of animals and that helps me become more multi-disciplinary in my work, but also shows how these different disciplines can help us better understand society and bring it back to what’s the point of humanities or history, which is to better understand ourselves.

Jimmy
Absolutely. I think that Singaporean Creatures is a great book, by the way, and I encourage everyone to read it. At this point of the interview, I’d just like to turn to more lighthearted things, as you say. If there’s an animal species that you could interview in your book, which would it be and why?

Tim
The snarky answer would be humans, but if there was an animal species I could interview and get real answers out of, if I could go in a time machine also, it would be to one of the pet stores before World War II where they sold monkeys. I would be interested in interviewing the animals in pet shops in 1920s or 1930s Singapore. They were all along Rochor Road.

Jimmy
There’s a photo I think, was it a gibbon or some kind of panther? Panther in a rickshaw that I’ve seen.

Tim
Yes. That's a great photo. Those animal collectors, I’m going to use the phrase, wonderfully attractive but chaotic culture around that. There were foreigners coming in, there were locals who collected animals and sold them and I would love to interview one of those animals that was in or just to go to one of these places and get a perspective of what they looked like.

Jimmy
It would be interesting. If you weren’t a historian, what would you choose as your profession?

Tim
I would be the centre fielder for the Cincinnati Reds. The problem is the Cincinnati Reds, a baseball team in America, probably wouldn’t take me. They’re not the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers or anything like this, but they were my local team when I was growing up. But in many respects, I see myself as a teacher, not a historian. I think NUS hired me and my main job is to teach students. My father was a professor of education and many members of my family are teachers. I think I would just have been funneled into, I’ll use the phrase, a teacher of some kind.

But if I could do what I wanted to do, and what I’ve been doing since I was 18 years old, I would be, and I mean this in a nice way, a hobo. I would travel. I would just go from place to place. Even as a university student, I would go backpacking in Europe or Southeast Asia. I had these opportunities given to me, and every job I took after graduation was with the opportunity to travel. I worked in Indonesia. I first came to Singapore in 1986 before the MRT opened. And I travelled throughout Thailand and China, you know, across the Soviet Union. You know, in other words, I love travelling.

So, I would say a hobo or perhaps a writer of Lonely Planet travel guides from the 80s, though that might date me considerably.

Jimmy
I think it does, but I think saying that you were here in Singapore before the MRT opened, unfortunately, you opened the floodgates on that.

Tim
There you go. And feeder buses were only 10 cents, I remember that. And you would pray it was air-conditioned. The feeder buses weren’t air-conditioned. But if the regular bus came, you would be going, please let it be air-conditioned, please let it be air-conditioned.

Jimmy
Tim, thank you very much for joining us on BiblioAsia+. To learn more about Singaporean Creatures, you must read Tim’s book, which can be found in all good bookstores and libraries everywhere around Singapore. Tim has written two articles in it, right? Or you wrote one article on mosquitoes?

Tim
And the introduction too. I wrote the introduction, one of the chapters, and I cowrote another chapter.

Jimmy
Your chapter on mosquitoes was quite interesting. I did not realise that, you know, that the dengue problem is in some ways human created.

Tim
Because of the urban landscape.

Jimmy
So if you’ve ever gotten dengue, you have to read Tim’s book to find out who to blame. Tim’s chapter. A BiblioAsia article about the Singapore Zoo that was based on an essay in this book can also be found on the BiblioAsia website. Tim, thank you very much for joining us, and I’m really looking forward to volume two of Singaporean Creatures.

Tim
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.

Jimmy
Thanks, Tim.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+.

Timothy Barnard, ed., Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (Singapore: NUS Press, 2024).

Timothy Barnard, Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019).

Timothy Barnard, Nature's Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016).

Timothy Barnard, ed., Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014).

Choo Ruizhi, "Animals, Anxieties and Aspirations: The Earlier Years of the Singapore Zoo," BiblioAsia 20, no. 3 (October–December 2024).

This episode of BiblioAsia+ was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Doppler Soundlab. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Timothy for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.