A woman in China is embracing a regular person’s apocalyptic nightmare by welcoming 100,000 cockroaches into her home.
37-year-old Yuan Meixia, of Fujian, uses her rural house as a breeding ground for the bug, where they are fed sugary treats, warmed by a gas-fire stove, and pampered with the loving care you’d give a spoiled dog.
Speaking to a local reporter who dared visit her, Yuan said the roaches ‘are all my children, my babies.’
Don’t let the maternal instincts fool you, Yuan is actually far more shrewd than she first appears. She isn’t an emotionally scarred loner with bad taste in pets, because she’s actually breeding the bugs for financial reasons.
The Palmetto cockroaches are popular in some traditional Chinese medicine, and pharmaceutical companies will pay about £75 per kilo for the bugs.
She’s a full service operation too, killing the critters as well as breeding them. She drowns them in vats of water, dries them in the sun, then has them shipped to a buyer over 900 km away.
