How a bounty meant to kill cobras bred more of them

HostImagine a world where a severed snake head was basically a piece of paper money. You could take it down to the local government office and trade it in for a few coins to pay for your groceries. It sounds like a horror movie, but it was a real plan to solve a huge problem in the city of Delhi a long time ago.

GuestThe city was crawling with deadly cobras, and the people in charge came up with what seemed like a very simple fix. They thought if we want fewer cobras, we need to make it expensive for those snakes to exist. So they offered a cash reward for every dead cobra brought to them. They assumed the whole city would turn into a force of part-time snake hunters. But their big mistake was thinking that the number of snakes was fixed and that people would only act as hunters, not as makers.

HostI don't really see how that's a mistake. If I see a snake and I know I can get paid for it, I'm going to kill it. That seems like a very straight line from the reward to the result.

GuestIt's a straight line, but humans are very good at finding the path of least resistance. The government used straight-line thinking. They thought: pay for dead snakes equals fewer live snakes. But people quickly realized that hunting wild cobras is dangerous and takes a lot of time. You might spend all day in the heat and find nothing. But then someone figured out that breeding cobras in a cage is actually pretty easy and safe. So, instead of going out to find snakes, people started setting up private cobra farms in their backyards and even in their basements. The payoff turned the cobra from a scary pest into a farm animal that made them money. By putting a price on the snake’s head, the government created a market demand that people were happy to meet by making more snakes themselves.

HostHold on, a backyard snake farm sounds like a total death wish. I can't imagine many people would be willing to keep a basement full of cobras just for a few coins.

GuestWhen you're just trying to get by, a steady payoff is hard to turn down. It became a whole little industry. And the people in charge didn't catch on for quite a while. They kept paying out all this money for dead cobras, but they noticed the number of snakes turned in stayed high while the number of cobras in the wild didn't go down at all. They were essentially funding a snake-making business. When they finally found the breeding operations, they were shocked and shut the program down immediately. They stopped paying for dead snakes right then and there.

HostSo that's the end of it? They stop the money, the farms close, and you just go back to the way things were?

GuestActually, that second choice was just as bad as the first one. Once the government stopped paying, those captive cobras were a huge money pit for the people who owned them. You have to feed them, and that costs money with no return. Since there was no payoff anymore, the breeders just opened the cages and let thousands of extra snakes go right into the streets of the city. The plan to get rid of the snakes ended up making the city much more dangerous than it was before the bounty ever started.

HostIt feels like the big problem here is that they were paying for the wrong thing. They were paying for a dead body, not a safe street.

GuestThat's the heart of it. This is what people now call the Cobra Effect. It's a trap that happens when a solution actually makes the problem worse. It's not just about snakes. In the city of Hanoi, the rulers tried to get rid of rats by paying for rat tails. They thought they were being smart by only asking for the tail because it would be less messy. But they started seeing rats running around with no tails. People were catching them, cutting off their tails for the reward, and letting them go so they could breed and make even more rats with tails. The lesson is that if you measure success by a stand-in, like a tail or a dead snake, instead of the real goal, people will find the fastest way to give you that stand-in. Even if it makes the real problem much worse.

HostIt's funny how a plan that looks so solid on paper can just crumble the moment it meets real people.

GuestThe most efficient path for a person is rarely the one the government wants them to take, especially when there's a cage and a payoff involved.

HostThe cobra head was supposed to be a way to buy safety, but in the end, it just bought a lot more cobras.