Cockroach breeder featured on TLC’s ‘My Kid’s Obsession’

Shelby Counterman holds one of her 7,000 cockroaches. Photo: TLC

Ten-year-old Shelby Counterman and her 7,000 cockroaches were featured on TLC’s “My Kid’s Obsession” TV special that aired on Dec. 28.

At 18 months old the Claremore, Okla., resident asked her mother, Meg Counterman, if she could keep insects at her home. Robert Gibbs, education coordinator for the Rogers County conservation district, advised the girl’s mother to say “yes,” which she eventually did when her daughter turned 3 years old.

“[Gibbs] told me, ‘Your child will never reach full potential if you hold them back,’ and explained that I didn’t want to pass on my fear of bugs and snakes to her, so I gave her five cockroaches for her [third] birthday,” Meg Counterman says in a recent interview. “He was right.”

What started as food for the girl’s lizard became a collection of 7,000 cockroaches after she put the male and female cockroaches together, unbeknownst to her parents, so the insects would breed.

“I secretly put them in the tank together, but after that, Mom decided they were not so bad,” Shelby Counterman tells Tulsa World.

During the TV special, the 10-year-old girl educated viewers about cockroaches and performed a live roach fashion show, where she dressed her insects as butterflies, cats, dogs, dragons and lizards, and others were dressed in bikinis, skirts, tuxedos and capes.

Her Argentinian wood cockroaches (Blaptica dubia), Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) and Indian domino cockroaches (Therea petiveriana) are kept in the family’s home at 92 to 95 degrees from heating pads, and they are fed to her bearded dragon, gecko and Chaco golden knee tarantula.

The young girl also is raising a colony of 4oo to 800 roaches for a citizenship project for her local 4-H group.

“I want to teach people that [some] bugs aren’t mean and scary like some others are,” Shelby Counterman tells Tulsa World. She also tells the local news source that she would prefer to be at home with her insects rather than in school, but that she has to go to school if she’s going to become a scientist.