How The Cleanest Country Kills to Maintain Its Status
Every city has a different way of dealing with urban cleanliness. But is it strict municipal laws that have the most success in making a city spotless?
Singapore is one of the most gorgeous landscapes there is. Living there for 8 years, one look can just make you fall in love with the place. I’m convinced that was the only time the phrase “love at first sight” lives true.
It houses prosperous vegetation, to-die-for landscapes, and popular beauty gurus.
Singapore is the largest port in Southeast Asia and one of the busiest in the world. It owes its growth and prosperity to its focal position at the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula, where it dominates the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea.
Singapore is in the equatorial monsoon region of Southeast Asia, and its climate is characterized by uniformly high temperatures and nearly constant precipitation throughout the year. Its majestic beauty is beyond me.
Although…every time I took a break and really inhaled the sight of Singapore, one question just never left my mind: how is the place so damn spotless all the time?
Everywhere you’d walk, you’d notice clean sidewalks, unpolluted air, and no sight of pigeons eating leftovers. For the longest time, I thought it was a
good — no, great, environmental factor about Singapore. It’s cleanliness was why I loved Singapore more than anything else.
But after living there for quite a while, I realized that I was missing out on some key observations. What does the government do to keep its country as shiny as a diamond? The more I thought about this, the more I become intoxicated with curiosity.
While my mom and I were riding the subway, she showed me a news article my aunt sent in the local family group chat. It summarized the tragedies Singapore had to pursue to keep itself clean.
So this is the extent to which Singapore was willing to go to (and quite possibly over) to gain the title of, “One of the cleanest countries in the world”.
But what does Singapore specifically do to maintain this rigorous status? And most importantly, are they taking in the concerns of its residents, wildlife, and vegetation into account?
Bird Massacre
Mr. Lim, 54, is on the front lines of a battle for his country’s territorial integrity, a member of the Singapore Gun Club who has been enlisted to help reduce an infestation of crows that at one point climbed to 150,000.
The club is one of the few places here that permits private weapons, though owners must lock them up before they leave.
Crows are everything that Singapore is not — raucous, undisciplined, dirty, and disorderly — and they are not welcome here.
They are the most annoying pest in this highly regulated city-state of four million people, and unlike the human population, they do not respond to government campaigns and directives. So they have to be shot.
“I myself have killed, I would say, about 40,000 of them,” Mr. Lim said, working in spare time from his job as a Web site editor.
From time to time, though, an emergency demands the shooters’ attention in the busiest parts of town and the police will clear a kill zone for them among the housing units.
Adding their guns to those of the club and working from dawn to dusk, the security company soon got the upper hand. The crow population was down to 35,000 or so.
Now, this can easily be rebutted by saying this is a necessary action to take because of bird flu and whatnot. Crows are found all over the world in a variety of habitats. They are mostly native to North America, but you don’t see news covering the mass killing of birds in those regions. Even anecdotes and complaints by residents show that health concerns aren’t the issue at all. Singapore is so obsessed with the idea of being clean that they struggle to realize the horrendous action they’re committing to stay on top.
Another source of bird-killing is straight-up poisoning these poor birds in the midst of daylight.
A Facebook user took to social media to express her anger and disgust over a recent culling operation in her neighborhood that saw unidentified officials feeding the poisoned bait to pigeons. In a clip she uploaded, the birds can be seen pecking on some feed in the middle of a square, with a group of people watching the whole thing from a distance. Moments later, some of the pigeons start writhing and flopping around on the ground before becoming motionless.
According to Suraiyah, her neighbors agreed that nobody faced problems with the pigeon population in the estate. “I have lived here for 38 over years, I don’t have respiratory issues directly linked to pigeon droppings, my neighborhood is clean except for numerous occasions when neighbors dump rubbish as and where they pleased,” she wrote, questioning how the culling is justified.
Just last year, a dog died after eating bread left out for a pigeon culling exercise.
This is what one of the many angry tweets directed to the Facebook post said:
Banning Gum
For legal reasons, I am not going to disclose whether or not I have broken this particular law…
When I asked my mom the reason for this, she told me it was so people don’t stick it on the train doors. Because if they did, and the doors closed, we would be locked in train forever. For some reason, I believed it because 8 year old me thought that gum = super glue.
The ban remains one of the best-known aspects of life in Singapore, along with the country’s laws against litter, graffiti, jaywalking, spitting, expelling “mucus from the nose” and urinating anywhere but in a toilet. (If it’s a public toilet, you are legally required to flush it.)
When Singapore became independent in 1965 it was a tiny country with few resources, so Lee, the country’s first prime minister, hatched a survival plan. This hinged on making the city-state a “first-world oasis in a third-world region”.
Before very long, Singapore was outstripping other developed countries in terms of its cleanliness, clipped lawns, and efficient transport system.
Lee was the prime minister of Singapore for quite a while and initially imposed the gum ban in 1995.
“Putting chewing gum on our subway train doors so they don’t open, I don’t call that creativity. I call that mischief-making,” Lee replied. “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.” Now I have no idea where the former prime minister was going with the banana analogy, but make inferences as you please.
But there’s a common misconception: it’s always been legal to bring small amounts in the country for one’s own use. What is illegal to do, however, is to mass sell chewing gum in Singapore.
Many call this law fair since it’s keeping Singapore clean (even though there are much better call-to-actions to pursue than banning gum), but I call BS. But to each, their own.
Personal Note
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