Four years ago, Sarah Borrego, a marketing specialist at El Paso Zoo, was brainstorming Valentine’s Day ideas with her team. The goal was to make a love-themed promo of sorts — perhaps highlighting the zoo’s ample insect collection. Borrego, who’d just gone through a breakup, made a joke about her ex being a cockroach.
“That’s when all the lightbulbs went flying,” Borrego told The Washington Post. “And we were like, ‘Can we pull this off?’”
That moment in 2019 turned into the zoo’s first edition of “Quit Bugging Me,” a campaign that allows people to name a Madagascar hissing cockroach after their ex lover, spouse or bestie — with the bonus that participants receive a video of a meerkat chomping down the critter.
“Roaches are like chocolate for meerkats. They destroy the roach, like they chew off the head and they suck it all up,” said Borrego, who named a cockroach after her former boyfriend that first year. “It’s honestly therapeutic, if we’re honest. Nine years down the drain, all eaten up by a happy animal.”
Since then, the cockroach-naming extravaganza at El Paso Zoo has raked in 50,000 name submissions and turned into an annual tradition. And zoos around the country have followed suit with their own twist on the anti-Valentine’s ritual.
“Valentine’s doesn’t have to just be about love and reminding yourself that you’re single,” Borrego said. “You can get back at that ex that made you single.”
Is it petty to name a bug after an un-loved one? Perhaps. Then again, the campaigns also help zoos support their animals, caretakers and conservation efforts. Take the San Antonio Zoo, which has raised over $80,000 since it launched its “Cry Me a Cockroach Fundraiser” campaign in 2020. The money raised by donors across all 50 states and 30 countries is aimed at “getting animals back into landscapes where they’re not threatened and moving them out from the endangered status,” said Cyle Perez, the zoo’s director of public relations and integrated marketing.
Perez said donors can name many of “the unsung heroes of the food chain” — cockroaches that are fed to opossums, small reptiles and Tawny frogmouths; rodents that are destined for snakes and Komodo dragons; or veggies that are happily eaten by hippos, giraffes and kangaroos. And for those feeling extra vengeful, the zoo will send over a digital Valentine’s card to a “not-so-special someone” informing them that their name has been used.
“It’s a win-win,” Perez added. “It’s lighthearted fun and a little bit of pettiness, but we’ve seen a lot of people find it either therapeutic or just comical. And we’re glad that we could be part of that process and that people are having new eyes on conservation work happening in the world.”
For Stephanie Carrell, a 28-year-old photographer and event coordinator from Chicago, naming cockroaches after the people who’ve wronged her has become a bit of an annual event.
“It was always kind of like people from the whole year and being like ‘Okay, time to name cockroaches again, who should I put on the list?’” Carrell said. “And if you think about it, it’s not petty because petty would be keying your car. I could have done that, but I took the high road by naming a cockroach.”
So far, Carrell has named at least six roaches through the Brookfield, Ill., zoo’s campaign — which doesn’t feed the roach to an animal but displays the roaches’ newly submitted names near the insects’ tank. Carrell’s list includes two former flames, a former friend, a guy “who was using me to make his ex-girlfriend jealous,” as well as a cheating ex and the person whom he cheated on Carrell with, she said.
Seeing their names written across pink hearts posted around a tank filled with leathery cockroaches gave Carrell the “ultimate feeling of closure.”
“I have to have something that’s just like, ‘if I don’t get closure from you on this relationship, then I’ll create closure for myself,’” she said. “And once I associate your name with a cockroach, I can’t see you as a friend or boyfriend anymore. You’re just a cockroach in my life.”
You've done the flowers, you've done the chocolates. But you can't spell “romance” without “roach”.
— Bronx Zoo (@BronxZoo) January 18, 2023
Okay, you can. But you shouldn't.
Love is in the air, and there's no better time to name a Bronx Zoo Madagascar hissing cockroach for your special someone https://t.co/epKXvBD61q pic.twitter.com/fxi9xsEFBD
Now, will naming a roach help you get over that love gone wrong? Not quite, Cortney S. Warren, a board-certified clinical psychologist and author of “Letting Go of Your Ex,” told The Post. While there’s no scientific data on whether vindictive cockroach-naming will help someone move on from a breakup, the desire to see someone — metaphorically — get eaten by an animal is a manifestation of “the common strong emotional response some people get after a breakup,” Warren said.
It’s normal to feel intense rage or anger after you’ve been ghosted, mistreated or cheated on, Warren added. But sweet revenge might “leave you rationally stuck to why they hurt you so much and why they deserve to be eaten as a cockroach. And that angry reaction actually keeps you fixated on your ex, instead of fixated on yourself and how you can move on.”
However, there could be some benefits. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help the zoo or like having this be a sort of symbolical moment for you,” Warren said. “You have to give yourself closure and reframe your perspective. People think hate is the opposite of love. That is actually really not true. The opposite of love and hate is indifference.”
While the zoos are still tallying up what the most-submitted name was this season, Borrega and Perez said the names Michael, Mike and Emily have come up the most.
“Jacob was last year, but this year — it looks like this year Michael did some pretty bad stuff,” Perez said.