Pathfinders Animal Oracle No 33 the Cockroach

Quote:
Originally Posted by souljourney
Was really looking through this deck yesterday card by card, etc. I gotta say "cockroach" is not a critter I want to see in my world...

I like that this deck has other creatures not seen in animal decks usually. The book, for a little book it is quite good actually.



No 33, the Cockroach!
Now here I am of 2 minds: In my own culture this is just another bug, another of the many Shape-changers that live upon the broad and diverse back of Mother Earth. Soooo - a feeling of neutrality. In Siberia there are not many Cockroaches. It is too cold in the winter. Here in the Canadian bush I have never seen one....
BUT In Toronto???????
In Ottawa?????? In the cheap housing projects where I was first forced to live when we got here so I could go back to uni and "redo" my degrees and get them "canadianised"
Roaches were living in the walls and iffff it had not been winter I would have rather lived in my tiny motor home .....
So there I adopted the western view of this Shape-changer!
Humans and their ways of living and their dirt and refuse are the reason for the explosion of roaches in urban areas. And also of rats, whose staple food they are......
Are'nt we just the greatest!????
I am now confronted with these 2 viewpoints and a card showing several of these critters, a big Palmeto bug = the huuuuuge ones I know from Florida, where they are endangered and protected and several others of different size eating a rind of bread.... this is adaptability and survival in spite of being "animal non grata"
Cockroaches will be there when the human's reign of this planet is long over.

For me, roaches remind me that I don't have to want to live with someone or be 'in their pockets' but I can still recognise the amazing gifts they bring to the world.

Roaches are-

* recyclers
* opportunists
* prolific
* survivors


I may not want to live with roaches but then neither do I want to live with a Lion, no matter how majestic!

Cockroaches definitely get a bad rap in our country, at least. Always being associated with unclean or unsanitary, old buildings. My only moment with a cockroach was at college, in the cafeteria. I was at one of those milk/water stations and while pouring my milk out, a cockroach came out from underneath the machine and crawled back under! I was grossed out, and didnt finish my meal that day. However, I had no choice but to go back and eat the next day, or starve!

But they do serve another purpose...to clean up what is left behind. A nice reminder for all of us trying to learn to live more "green" and care for the planet. We are such a throw away society. Cockroach teaches us to recycle and re-use. To not throw things out, but finish what is on our plate, or use the things we have and own and give unwanted things to others via charity or yardsales, or whatever means we have. In a sense, cockroach is far wiser than us!

Ok...
I totally recognize cockroaches are amazing creatures. And yep they can survive pretty much anything... sometimes even the Orkin Man (pest control company).
They are opportunistic and extremely adaptable.
Because of these qualities they are beings we can learn something from.
They also point out, like Mi-Shell said, that we ourselves are many times what makes them appear in our space by being slobs.

I also however do know people who have Madagascar Hissing Roaches as "pets". They are fascinating to them... I can't even look at them hardly. Also know people who breed them for lizard food. Roaches have a "excellent meat to shell ratio" I hear. So they are evidently a food of choice for some critters. I personally won't feed them to my lizards only because I don't want any accidentally getting lose in my house.

So cockroach...
adaptable
survival
opportunistic
community
make the most of what you have

How about rat next... I have 15 pet ones.

something interesting I found in Wikipedia:

The insect can travel quickly, often darting out of sight when someone enters a room, and can fit into small cracks and under doors despite its fairly large size. It is considered one of the fastest running insects.

In an experiment carried out at the University of California at Berkeley (USA) in 1991, a Periplaneta americana registered a record speed of 5.4 kilometres per hour (3.4 mph), about 50 body lengths per second, which would be comparable to a human running at 330 km/h (205 mph).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cockroach

Ok Mi-Shell... that is just plain creepy. LOL.

But it helps them survive.