Cobra Attack!

Read about this online earlier today and I thought it pretty neat. Kinda like the law of unintended consequences marries human nature and has a baby.

Apparently, when the Brits ruled India, deaths due to cobra attacks were so frequent that the imperial power felt it necessary to do something. So Parliament – or whatever English body governed India; it may even have been some enterprising magistrate – passed a law creating a bounty to be paid out for every dead cobra brought to the authorities.

At first, death by cobra bite declined because, well, the cobra population declined.

However, industrious – being stricken with poverty tends to make some industrious – Indians began to breed cobras just to collect the bounties.

When the British government caught on, they stopped their pay-outs.

So what did the Indians then do to their worthless legless pets? They let them go into the wild.

And the snake bite mortality rate went right back up, and may have possibly surpassed the original figures.

Whether true or apocryphal (and the article I read it in assured me it was grounded in historical fact), I can’t shake the sense that something like this will metaphorically descend upon our country before the next four years is out.