Xinderella the foster cat has a microchip, a human guardian and a stable home, but she lives in a state of regulatory limbo. Under murky new rules governing cats in Singapore’s public housing, she is not registered to the apartment where she sleeps.

The plucky, three-legged tabby is one of an unknown number of cats that recently became legal to keep as pets in Singapore, where more than four in five residents live in public housing. The reversal of a 35-year ban on cats in public housing apartments that went into effect this year was a big deal for cat people who had been quietly breaking the rules for decades.

The new rules are thin on details, at least by the standards of a wealthy city-state of about six million people that prides itself on order and efficiency.

Singapore has a thicket of ordinances and punishments, including heavy fines for littering and other minor infractions, and it imposes the death penalty for marijuana trafficking. But the government has not said how it plans to enforce the new cat rules nor penalise cat owners who disobey them. It has also not specified how it will regulate foster cats like Xinderella.

“All of us are navigating through a lot of question marks,” Xinderella’s foster parent, Kartika Angkawijaya, said recently in her bright-pink public housing block. “Xin,” a one-year-old “narcissist” — she doesn’t get along with her four feline housemates — was pacing in a cage.

Even if the rules are expanded and clarified, animal-welfare advocates say they probably won’t be a quick fix for several cat-related problems, including abandonments that drive the population of strays on public housing estates, and safety lapses that have allowed some cats to fall to their deaths.

Many Singaporeans let their cats roam without sterilizing them, and kittens are sometimes dumped on the street. The burden of care often falls to low-income volunteers.

Animal advocates say mandatory sterilisation would alleviate those pressures, but the government worries that it could deter owners from licensing cats. Officials say they are focused for now on incentivising voluntary sterilisation and on expanding a programme that has sterilised and micro-chipped strays since 2011.

But exactly how Singapore will amend or enforce its new cat rules remains unclear.

“It’s just so many stakeholders you have to take into consideration,” said Dr Anna Wong, one of the Singaporean officials overseeing the new Cat Management Framework. “Cat owners, but also people who don’t like cats, people who are scared of cats. And also welfare groups, low-income households.”

No one knows how many cats live in Singapore. Registration for domestic cats opened when the new rules took effect in September. The government says there are an estimated 13,000 “free-roaming” cats in publicly accessible ground-level areas, a figure that could increase with more surveys.

One volunteer, Norfizah Kassim, said that she had fed dozens of strays every night for about three years, at a monthly cost of about $700 Singapore, or $533. She said her attachment to the cats had grown over time. “First it was one case, and then we got close to them,” she said on a recent evening, as she loaded a pick-up truck with cat food.

The number of cats on the streets is anyone’s guess. What’s clear is that caring for them takes a toll on volunteers, some of whom “don’t know where to draw the line,” said Shelby Doshi, who investigates abandonments by and knocking on doors.

New York Times News Service