"Cobra Effect":
When the proposed solution to a problem ends up making it worse.
Named for an anecdote told about The British colonial solution to India's venomous cobra problem. A bounty was offered for every dead cobra, resulting in entrepreneurs farming, breeding them...
(📷: Kamalnv)
When the British realized they were subsidizing cobra farming, they canceled the program, resulting in all the farmed cobras being released, increasing the number of venomous cobras loose in populated areas.
(📷: Krishnendu Halder / Reuters)
Similar stories:
Hanoi under French colonial rule paid bounties on rat tails, which quickly gave rise to a burgeoning industry of rat breeding.
Even wild trappers would cut tails and release rats back to sewers to procreate to ensure a good future harvest.
'Four Pests' campaign under Mao Zedong aimed to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes & sparrows.
People killed sparrows to prevent grain losses, resulting in overpopulation of crop pests that reduced yield and contributed to the Great Famine (1959-1961) that killed >15 million.
(📷: Andreas Trepte)
China ended up re-importing 250,000 sparrows from the USSR to control the locust population.
Mao then designated the fourth pest to be bedbugs, and then later cockroaches. No word on whether this led to bedbug and cockroach farming.
There's a real present example of this happening now in Texas with feral hogs (feral hog abatement program).
I read that people there are now breeding them and releasing them to keep the program going so they can have an excuse to hunt them and get paid for doing it.
There are already 2M of them in Texas, and we can only kill 40-50,000 per year. I don't think there's any risk of decline anytime soon.
tfsweb.tamu.edu/uploadedFile...
I read about it a few years ago, at the time neighboring states had done a good job of reducing the population but Texas decided to go with the most Texas solution of all; make sure you always have enough to shoot :D
I guess these guys were just lazy and wanted to be able to shoot them nearby?
And I did try to find the article to link you, but as of late it seems like Google search engine is just crap. I think the days of being to find obscure things is mostly gone, and now the page rank algorithm is just giving whatever is most popular and safe.
Yep. Giving people an economic incentive to kill an animal rarely ends up with that animal species getting eliminated. Here in KS it's illegal to hunt wild hogs unless you're the landowner and that's one reason we're not overrun. People can't important them for high fenced hunting operations.
Same with coyotes here in the states. I've never found hard evidence people were raising them but there are tons of newspaper articles talking about it across the country.
Oh this was way back in the 1800s/early 1900s. I have an article from Oregon saved somewhere that talked about sheep ranchers getting 1 or 2 dollars per sheep compared to 6 bucks per coyote from the bounty. I've never found first hand accounts of someone doing it but lots of talk.
