British controlled India had some problems. The British invaders were destroying India's religions, changing their government, and forcing them speak a whole new language. And also snakes were everywhere. More specifically cobras, which are statistically the worst type of snake to have everywhere.
The British governor of Delhi, none too pleased about said snakes, decided to offer a bounty on cobra skins. He figured a little money for one less venomous monster slithering around his city would do everyone a little good. The crowdsourced extermination took off all according to plan, the civilian population began slaughtering everything with scales they could get their hands on.
But the government, in their overzealousness for getting rid of the snakes, made one small mistake. They set the bounty for the skins too high. Namely, the reward for one dead snake was a significantly greater amount of money than it cost to breed and raise one.
You can see where this is going.
Many people realized that it was much easier to simply sit at home and raise cobras, compared to going out and actually hunting them. This realization gave birth to an entirely new profession: the snake farmer. Eventually the government, realizing the scaled mini-satans were still everywhere, caught on to the racket and called off the bounty. Predictably, this resulted in the snake farmers returning to their day jobs; loosing their worthless/terrifying stock into the city. Which, ironically, resulted in a much larger/terrifying infestation.
