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of Cockroaches and Ants

Recently, there seems to be an infestation or sort of cockroaches and ants in my house.  There are more ants scurrying along the cabling routes and floor of my house. For the cockroaches, these creatures are sighted occasionally though my wife and I know that their numbers are not small. No matter how we spray the insecticide and with me going to the extent of putting pandan leaves into the cupboard cabinets where these cockroaches are always lurking, they seem to be always there.
Gradually, I realise that contradictory to popular beliefs, the pandan leaves seem not to work as I saw one cockroach even moving around the pandan leaves. These cockroaches seem to come deep from within a drainage pipe for which I spray insecticide regularly. All our methods towards preventing the cockroaches number seem futile. Going forward, we will be exploring a sink trap or a device like that to prevent cockroaches from deep in the pipe coming into our house.
Now, I come to ants. For ants, their problem seems easier to look at. There are ants for only one reason and bingo, the reason is food. Without food, there should be fewer ants. However we notice that there are ants even though there are no morsels of food left on the dining table or floor. Surprisingly, these ants seem to like to transverse along cable trays. I do not like to resort to killing insects but the great numbers of ants really perturb I and my wife hence I have no choice but to resort to killing the poor ants.
As I used my fingers to do the merciless deed, scenes of childhood flashed back to my mind: those of me killing and torturing the ants when I was a child. I think such “population control” is inevitable: I read the news yesterday that the authorities are looking into culling the thousands of mynahs crowding Orchard Road. Since population control time memorial and from what I have learnt in school about predators, prey, food chain, population control, all these seem to “justify” my actions but I really have no choice to kill these poor ants.
I hope that there will be not many ants that I have to see. I am really sorry for these ants I killed. But I have no choice. Sorry Ants!
Hmm, somehow I seem not to have any sense of guilt killing cockroaches. I do not know why. Maybe it seems to stem from education since young that ants are hardworking creatures while cockroaches are detestable, ugly-looking creatures.  However, there is one trait that I admire about cockroaches which is that no matter how you crumble and thrash these creatures, they still seem okay. Hence that may be the reason why these cockroaches thrive since thousands of years ago.

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