A Misguided Effort to Fight a Pest Infestation
The British authorities’ cancellation of the program to pay cash for cobra skins turned out to be as misguided as the program’s initiation. Without the bounties, captive cobras bred for their skins were now worthless. So Delhi’s cobra breeders did what was economically sensible from their perspective, and released the snakes back into the wild. The “wild” in this case was the city of Delhi. The snake infestation was increased by orders of magnitude, and Delhi wound up with many more cobras than it had before the authorities launched their misguided plan.
French colonial authorities had a similar, albeit less disastrous, experience in Hanoi, Vietnam. There, the colonial authorities sought to enlist civilians to control a city-wide rat infestation. Like the British, the French authorities offered bounties, in this case payable upon delivery of rat tails. However, colonial officials soon began to notice many tail-less rats scurrying around the city. Unlike the Indians of Delhi, the enterprising Vietnamese of Hanoi did not breed the targeted pets. Instead, rat catchers simply severed their tails. They then released them back into the city to procreate and produce more rats, and thus maintain the rat catchers’ stream of revenue.