I love and admire all roaches and find them all fascinating in their own way, but yeah, that doesn’t mean I want the pest species in my house. :P They’ve adapted to live in filth, much like raccoons, opossums, rats, etc… if they weren’t pushed out of their natural habitat and forced to live amongst us, they would be very clean animals. When they live in our homes, they crawl over -our- garbage and -our- filth, then crawl onto our more sanitary areas where we cook, etc… so obviously they’re not good to have in your home.

If they weren’t such good escape artists, I’d happily keep pest species (if acquired from a source where they’ve been bred in captivity and not captured in homes where they may have walked over nastiness or pesticide) in aquariums to observe and get photos of etc, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

One pest species I’ve been trying hard to acquire, however, is the smokybrown roach. I love how they look, and have never, ever seen them in the wild or in homes. I don’t know why, they’re supposed to be quite common, but all I ever see are Australian, German, American skunk and tiny ectobius pallidus roaches down here.