Then and now: You've got tails in Singapore
Ducks at a pet farm in 2023. In January 2025, The Straits Times' Life section launched a weekly Pets page as its 'pet project'.
On Oct 6, 1964, a Tuesday, Myrtle Chee walked into The Straits Times' office at Times House in Kim Seng Road with a photograph of a dog.
It was her pet, Peggy, a fawn-coloured boxer with white patches, which had gone missing three days before.
Myrtle, 15, a Methodist Girls' School student, wanted to offer a reward to anyone who found Peggy or could give information leading to her discovery, the paper reported in a short article on Page 4, nestling it between cinema advertisements and a lead story on Mr Devan Nair agreeing to stay on as NTUC chief.
A day after the story on Myrtle Chee's missing dog was published, she got her pet back.
PHOTOS: ST FILE
Happily, just a day after the report was published, a man found Peggy wandering along Bartley Road, near the Ramakrishna Mission Home, and took the dog back to the teenager, the paper reported in a follow-up story.
One wonders if there was the same happy ending for five-year-old twins Juliet and Jennifer, who were so worried about their missing dog, Caesar, that they refused to go on holiday to Penang with their family.
Instead, on Aug 4, 1965, they came to the newspaper office with their mother to appeal for information on their dog, which, incidentally, was also a boxer.
No mention was ever made about whether Caesar was found.
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It is likely that pet ownership in Singapore became more common only after World War II. Search for the word 'pet' and there are slim pickings in the newspaper archives before the 1950s. Most articles mentioning domestic animals did not originate in Singapore or Malaya.
Most, but not all.
On July 5, 1897, an article headlined 'A talk of geese' told the story of a woman in Kuala Lumpur who had been robbed of her flock of geese, one of which was 'a special pet'.
She later came upon a Chinese man who had possession of what looked like her flock, and the two of them were asked by the police to prove that they were the rightful owner.
'The Chinaman called the geese in vain... Then the lady softly pronounced the pet name of her favourite bird, and instantly it waddled to its mistress, and the whole flock followed its lead.'
A notable pet that graced the pages was an Italian greyhound belonging to the King of Siam, which was lost in Singapore en route from Britain to Siam in January 1904. The greyhound, 'wearing blue silk collar', was found two days after it had gone missing and landed later in Bangkok in 'the lap of royal luxuriousness'.
Reports of missing or stolen pet dogs cropped up in the news in the 1930s and 1940s, including a 1940 case in which a Eurasian woman accused a man of stealing her poodle, valued at $80.
Most missing dogs are never found, the paper reported in 1986, citing the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which received about 35 calls a month about these lost animals. Only one or two dogs were reunited with their owners through the society.
While pets appeared to be the preserve of the landed classes, it was reported in 1977 that the Housing Board had begun giving out licences for pet shops across different housing estates. 'The move is in response to a recent call by the Minister for National Development and Communications, Mr Lim Kim San, to encourage a love of nature among high-rise dwellers,' said the article.
In 1978, HDB began letting flat dwellers keep up to one dog – from a list of permitted breeds – in their homes. Cat lovers had to wait for decades before HDB
relaxed its rules in September 2024 to allow up to two cats in a flat.
The Straits Times reported that there were an
estimated 94,300 pet cats here in 2023 , up from 85,100 in 2019 and 126,100 pet dogs in 2023, up from 123,600 in 2019, citing figures from data analytics firm Euromonitor International.
Cat lovers had to wait for decades before the Housing Board relaxed its rules in September 2024 to allow up to two cats in a flat.
ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR
From being a relative rarity in Singapore, pets have become a part of many people's lives here.
In January this year, the Life section launched its weekly Pets page on Mondays as its 2025 'pet project'. The offerings include pet-related listicles and features, as well as a
fortnightly Celeb Pawrents series on local personalities and their pets.
Deputy life editor Jeanmarie Tan, 48, says: 'We noticed that pet ownership and interest in all things pets is at its peak in Singapore, so it made sense to carve out a dedicated and regular environment for a growing lifestyle sector and serve the corresponding readership.'
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