When you kill a cockroach, you cannot be accused of murder in any law court.
When you kill a cockroach, you are simply performing a hygiene ritual. A necessary ritual to rid your home, office, restaurant and environment of dirt, and harbinger of disease. Cockroaches are insets; they are parasites with their roles in the ecosystem but certainly not a beneficiary one to human and healthy living. Cockroaches are the antonyms of cleanliness. Any where you see a cockroach; the bet is that 95% out of 100%, the environment is dirt. Cockroaches cannot thrive in a clean environment.
If your house is infested with cockroaches, you need to check your barometers of cleanliness. Imagine a dignitary sitting in your living room, and an uninvited roach-guest walked up to him, and quickly dashed under the sofa chair to escape the sledge hammer of the shoe heel. You won’t feel cool about that, you know. As a rule of courtesy, your guest too may pretend it doesn’t matter but it does leave an impression particularly if it is a first time visit to your home. You have to review the job description of your housekeeper/maid/cleaner, if cockroaches co-reside with you at home. You may have to re-task your kids about cleanliness, if you are having a running battle to rid your home of cockroaches. You may have to call an emergency meeting of your financial stakeholders if fumigation companies have turned your premises into a cash-cow because cockroaches and other parasites are comfortably residing in your premises and have ignored your quit notice.
Cockroaches are not demons. They are not agents of the devil assigned to monitor and transmit intelligent information about your household to the spirit world. The West use artificial bugs in the shape of different insects for surveillance, intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence missions. Ironically, your ‘face-me-I-face-you’ apartment or mansion-in-the-slum-neighborhood does not hold potential attractions to any superpower secret service agency to want to deploy such expensive bugs around you. The presence of roaches in your home is neither demonic nor a MOSSAD/FBI/M15 initiative. The verdict is: your home is not clean. Clean up!
Declare war against dirt, and get rid of cockroaches and other parasites like wall gecko, houseflies, spiders, etc from your home. In your kitchen, particularly your kitchen top. In your kitchen cupboards. Under the sink and those areas where you store utensils and boxes that you seldom use. Behind the refrigerator. Behind your fridges. In the pantry. In the shelves where you keep your books. Under the bed. Under the sofa chairs. In all the places/items you have left unattended to for a while. In the toilet and bathroom areas. There you will find the cockroaches that compete for residency in your home. Spraying of insecticides is good but continued spraying of insecticides can become toxic particularly when you have growing children at home. The way to eliminate cockroaches in your house is, CLEAN UP. And, ALWAYS.
The rule of the home applies to the office and other public places, particularly restaurants where owners are in the business of offering food that people eat. If your office is infested with cockroaches, your Cleaner or Office Assistant needs to do more to justify the monthly earnings being drawn from the company. Your office is the wrong place to find cockroaches. If there is a stray cockroach there, particularly the tiny species, it is likely that it traveled there in the suit, skirt or bags of some untidy office workers. An Executive Director I knew had been in a Board Meeting where attendees had to grapple with the tiny species dashing across the board room table, and none of them in suits and skirts were willing to admit that they were the carriers. Except the facility was infested, and not clean. But, it was some sort of embarrassment for the Chairman! The way to avoid such embarrassment is, CLEAN UP. And, ALWAYS.
Have you ever walked elegantly into a star-studded restaurant to place order for a meal only to be greeted with the sight of a standard-sized African cockroach (or is it German cockroach, American cockroach, Australian cockroach or Oriental cockroach) adjusting its antenna to properly see you behind the trays of snacks. The cockroach is certainly not part of the delicacy on display for sale. It is a symptom of malady. It shows how unkempt the restaurant is. It indicates the level of attention the restaurant pays to issues of Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). You may ask me, why the big grammar of HSE because of a cockroach? In order to clear your doubt, and before you order for your meal just pay a visit to the bathroom (toilet) of the restaurant to confirm their HSE compliance. You won’t come back disappointment. It is better to hold a conference with your legs, and beat a retreat instead of buying a meal from an unclean restaurant. Haven’t you seen a bowl of take-away meal with a dead cockroach as a topping? Graphic, right? It is just stating the obvious! The way to avoid such experience is. CLEAN UP. And, ALWAYS.
If you were born in the South Western part of Nigeria between 1960s and 1980s, you probably would have heard this folk song, which I have freely translated into English for the understanding of non-Yoruba speakers:
Turn aside: (Yi ese re si apa kan)
Don’t kill an insect. (Ma se pa kokoro na)
Insects that you can’t create: (kokoro ti iwo ko le da)
God made them all. (Olorun lo da won)
Whilst this teaches considerations and respect for animal/insect rights, it certainly does not apply to cockroaches unless you are the type that live and flourish in a dirty environment.
Every person must take responsibility for their cleanliness whether at home, in the office, at the restaurant or in the public. Hygiene is important to good living. A cockroach-free house should not be difficult to achieve if every household cleans up, and always. A cockroach-free office and environment should not be difficult if all stakeholders clean up, and always.
If you kill a cockroach, you are not committing murder. You will not be charged for any offense. You are only ridding your environment of dirt, and disease. You are simply obeying the law of cleanliness and healthy living. It is safer and less expensive to live healthy, and free your household and environment from cockroaches than to contend for space with them as unauthorized tenants.
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Note: Picture Credit: http://malct32.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-to-kill-cockroach.html
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