Have you ever tried to come up with a solution to a prevalent problem, only for the solution to backfire and as if that's not enough, it ends up aggravating the problem instead?
Well, if that has ever happened to you, you've experienced the Cobra Effect firsthand, whether you realized it or not.
The Cobra Effect is usually illustrated through an early British and Indian tale.
Between 1858 and 1947, the British Empire colonized, ruled over and developed some parts of India including Delhi. The development included the construction of canals and railroads.
While encountering a cobra can be frightening (and yes, the author has an absurd phobia of those slithering creatures). It's even worse getting bitten by one. During their colonizing era, the British men were facing trouble from cobras in Delhi, compounded by the fact that India's ecological makeup differed vastly from that of the United Kingdom which was itself a significant setback.
The cobra issue had become rampant and it had led to the drastical reduction of British colonizers. This then alarmed and drew heavy concern from the British government.
Since cobras posed a real threat to the British men, the colonizers introduced a bounty to be paid for every dead cobra. This incentivized and prompted the natives to hunt wild cobras.
Over time, the cobra population dropped and Delhi grew safer for the British. It was during this period that people began rearing cobras themselves, since catching and killing a captive cobra was far easier than relentlessly hunting one in the wild.
Before long, the British colonizers caught on to this scheme and felt foolish, once they realized their miscalculation. They then decided to dismantle the bounty altogether.
This of course, angered the natives, who had no option but to release their now worthless captive cobras into the wild.
This ultimately resulted in an even higher cobra population in Delhi, and India as a whole, than before the bounty was ever introduced.
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