In 1999, a chimpanzee named Ramba pulled her lip down to show him she was bleeding.

Louis Ng was twenty years old, a volunteer zookeeper helping out at photography sessions with the chimps. Ramba was about a year old. A playful little ape who loved being tickled, she would grab his finger to tickle herself and then chuckle.

One day, during a session, Ramba misbehaved. The keeper punched her in the face.

Ramba didn't run. She walked over to Louis, hugged him, and pulled her lip down so he could check whether it was bleeding.

He founded ACRES two years later.

If you've ever wondered why Singapore has one of the strictest animal protection regimes in Southeast Asia, or why your cat is now legal in your HDB flat, or why migrant workers are no longer transported on the back of open lorries, a significant part of the answer traces back to a chimpanzee and a twenty-year-old biology student who decided he couldn't look away.

Louis Ng Kok Kwang was born on December 8, 1978.

He attended St. Gabriel's Secondary School and Catholic Junior College, then earned a BSc in Biology from the National University of Singapore and a Master's in Primate Conservation from Oxford Brookes University in the UK.

While still an undergraduate in 2001, he founded the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society, better known as ACRES. He was 22.

He didn't wait for a career. He didn't wait for funding. He started with volunteers and built ACRES from a student project into a professional animal welfare organisation with over 20 full-time staff and annual revenue exceeding S$1 million by 2014.

In 2005, an ACRES undercover investigation exposed the scale of Singapore's exotic pet trade, leading to coordinated crackdowns and seizures of protected species. The work influenced amendments to the Endangered Species Act in 2006, imposing stricter penalties for wildlife trafficking.

In 2015, he entered politics.

Louis Ng stood as a People's Action Party candidate in Nee Soon GRC and won. For the next decade, he became one of the most vocal MPs in Parliament, but not in the way most people expect from a PAP backbencher.

He championed unpopular and uncomfortable causes from inside the ruling party.

He pushed for cats to be allowed in HDB flats, a ban that affected millions of Singaporeans who kept cats illegally and lived in quiet fear of being reported. He fought for legislation against secondhand smoke. He argued for a reduction in single-use plastics. He co-initiated a Private Member's Bill with MP Cheng Li Hui to strengthen penalties for wildlife offences, proposing fines up to S$100,000 and imprisonment of up to seven years.

And he pushed to ban the practice of transporting migrant workers on the back of open lorries, a sight every Singaporean sees on the expressway but few had the political will to challenge.

Rice Media put it best when they profiled him: "All Singaporeans Matter. This Is Why MP Louis Ng Champions Unpopular Causes."

In January 2021, after 20 years, he stepped down as CEO of ACRES to focus fully on parliamentary work. In 2025, he announced his retirement from politics before GE2025 at the age of 46. He later joined the National University of Singapore.

Here's what I think about when I think about Louis Ng, and why his career matters to anyone trying to change things from inside a system.

He was a PAP MP who behaved like an activist, and that combination is rarer than it sounds. Most ruling party backbenchers follow the consensus quietly and focus on constituency work. Louis picked fights that made people uncomfortable, including people within his own party.

The causes he chose tell you who he is: animals, migrant workers, cats in HDB flats, secondhand smoke. These are not vote-winning issues. Nobody runs for Parliament on a platform of letting cats stay in public housing. But these are the issues that affect the most vulnerable: creatures that can't speak, workers who aren't citizens, residents who live with rules that don't make sense but nobody challenges.

He left politics on his own terms at 46, not because the system pushed him out, but because he'd fought the fights he came to fight.

It started with a chimpanzee who pulled her lip down to show a twenty-year-old that she was hurt.

Twenty-five years later, the animals have laws, the cats have homes, and the man who couldn't look away chose to keep looking until something changed.