A lively history of otters, crocodiles and other Singaporean Creatures

What claims do animals - say, the Zouk otters of social media fame, the feared and dengue-carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti Singapore's most iconic orang utan Ah Meng Singaporean? or have to being Surely not by dint of legal citizenship or self-identification, but perhaps by the status Singapore's human denizens and policymakers have bestowed on these creatures.

- : Shawn Hoo

One might recall Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's words in 2018 upon the death of Inuka, the first polar bear born in the tropics at the Singapore Zoo: "He was as Singaporean as any of us." A new volume of essays on environmental history furnishes a lively and persuasive account of Singapore's relationship with animals from the mid-20th century onwards. It follows the fate and agency of creatures like the crocodile from the final years of British colonial rule to Singapore's nascent independence up to the present.

Edited by Timothy P. Barnard, associate professor in the department of history at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singaporean Creatures does not explicitly argue for the peculiar even provocative - moniker it uses as its title.

In his introduction, Barnard settles for the Singaporean Creature's "complex role and position in Singaporean society and history", but is cautious not to venture a restrictive definition tied solely to ideas of governance and control.

Readers, therefore, are free to draw conclusions from the collection's eight wide-ranging essayswritten mostly by historians which implicitly argue for a term that at once implies citizenship, ownership, belonging and affinity.

For a "preliminary investigation", the scholarly book certainly throws up several interesting conjectures and its fascinating narration of ideas will keep even the layman reader riveted.