Miami Beach is considering offering rewards for dead iguanas after the price of hiring experts to exterminate the animals increased to more than $200,000.
Miami Beach is plagued with iguana issues. The land is being severely damaged by an invasive species of American iguanas, also known as green iguanas. The species was originally noted in Florida in the 1960s and is indigenous to southern Brazil all the way up to Mexico. A native species of tree snails has been discovered in their stomachs, indicating they may pose a threat to the endangered species in addition to destroying plants (eating pretty much any fruit or vegetable they can get their mouths on).
The species is currently protected by anti-cruelty legislation, however citizens of Florida are permitted to kill it in a “humane” manner. However, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez stated in a meeting last week that by giving bounties for the reptile, the issues of escalating exterminator expenses and the iguana problem itself may be resolved.
“I’m not sure if they’re dead or alive. Gonzalez stated in the meeting, per a report from Local 10, “But if we pay per iguana we’re going to receive more iguanas. “People will go out and look for them to steal money. That, in my opinion, is a better use of our funds.
Even while that looks like a simple (and perhaps brutal) answer, history is rife with instances of similar plans whose creators later realized they had unintentionally encouraged the incorrect behavior. Ironically, given the relative paucity of evidence compared to other comparable legends, the “Cobra Effect” is the most well-known example.
The tale goes as follows: under Britain’s direct authority over India, the British Colonial Government made the decision to try and manage the cobra population in Delhi. They believed it would be wise to give a bounty for any deceased cobras turned in to the administration, much like Miami 2022 did. Given the large number of dead cobras that kept turning up, it initially appeared to be a success. Given that dead cobras were turning up in great numbers, it then appeared to be unsuccessful.
The government did not realize that, in its need for dead cobras, it was pushing people to produce cobras for their own use before killing them to claim the prize.
When rats overran the city of Hanoi in Vietnam in 1902, a similar situation occurred. The colonial French government started paying locals to eliminate rats, or so they believed. The colonial kings determined that they would pay 1 cent for each rat tail because they felt that dealing in rat corpses would require too much work.
The scheme appeared to be a huge success at first. Rat tails were pouring in, and it appeared that many individuals were killing the animals.
However, soon after entering the Vietnamese section of the city, officials looked at some of the rats that were scurrying around and discovered that they were missing their tails. Entrepreneurial types had only chopped off the rats’ tails and released them into the wild in order to breed more expensive tails, as opposed to really killing the rats.
In essence, the government had unintentionally encouraged rat maiming in an effort to encourage rat-killing. Even worse, some began raising rats for profit on their own farms. The city’s rat population expanded, and a year later cases of the bubonic plague started to appear. In 1906, a greater outbreak occurred.
