In 1897, 40-year-old French government employee Paul Doumer came to Hanoi. He left his career as finance minister after the major failure of his new income tax plan and was offered the post of Governor-General of Indochina – a group of French colonies in Southeast Asia that included Vietnam.
Doumer began to equip Indochina, especially the capital Hanoi, with a modern infrastructure system with the aim of demonstrating the prosperity of France. Entering the new century, the house of a typical French colonialist in Hanoi is located on a wide boulevard with rows of tall trees. The spacious villa has many rooms, contains fine furniture from Europe, and most notably – has a toilet.
The story was published on Atlas Obscura on June 6 with the title “The rat massacre in Hanoi in 1902 did not go as planned”.
What better way to distinguish French Hanoi from old Hanoi than the toilet, thought Doumer. The large underground sewer system of urban areas in France and the smaller system serving densely populated areas in Vietnam are symbols of cleanliness and progress.
Therefore, he was completely dismayed when rats began to appear in the sewers.
When the colonial government owned by Doumer put more than 9 miles of sewer pipes underground in Hanoi, inadvertently 9 miles of cool rodent paradise was also created, where they freely proliferated without any problems. not afraid of any carnivores. If hungry, they easily penetrate directly into the most luxurious apartments in the city through the “highway” hidden deep under human footsteps. Just like that, the mouse grew exponentially, gradually spilling over to the ground.
As if that wasn’t enough to shatter the colonists’ illusions of Europe as peaceful in the heart of Asia, plague began to emerge and rats were suspected of spreading the disease.
To deal with the outbreak of the epidemic, a solution was devised. Vietnamese rat hunters are hired by the government to go down the drain to catch each rat in person, the wages are paid according to the quantity.
The rat “massacre” in Hanoi quickly took place. In the last week of April 1902, 7,985 rats were killed – that was just the beginning. The “killers” continued to accumulate experience in May, pushing the number of dead rats to more than 4,000 a day. This number is becoming more and more astounding. Only on May 30, 15,041 mice were terminated. By June, the number of rats killed per day reached 10,000, peaking at 22,112 on June 21.
We don’t know exactly how the rats were killed, that detail has been lost in the course of history. We only know about this rat hunt because in the 90s, historian Michael Vann, while studying French colonialism, discovered the document “Animal extermination: Rats”.
Inside the document were a number of messy, confusing papers, recording a list of the number of rats exterminated in Hanoi at the turn of the new century. What happened to the poor rats? Vann was intrigued by the material and decided to dig into the story.
Hunting mice is not easy. Here’s what Vann writes back: “One must infiltrate the dark, cramped sewers, traverse human waste in various forms of decay, and hunt for rather ferocious wildlife. , which may include fleas that carry plague or other infectious diseases. That doesn’t even mention the possibility of other dangerous animals like snakes, spiders, and creatures that scare me to the point of goosebumps.”
Eventually, the colonial authorities realized they could not reduce the rat population with the use of small-scale rat extermination armies.
They switched to plan B, asking all the villagers to join the hunt. The reward given is one coin per mouse. What you have to do is send the rat’s tail to the city office to prove it and get the reward. That way, the government won’t be inundated with the carcasses of intact rats. “I’ve always wondered who the hell is going to have to count those rat tails,” Mr. Vann said.
The French were especially pleased with this option at that time because they were encouraging entrepreneurialism in Vietnam. At first, everything seemed to work quite well. The rat tails are constantly being transferred.
However, curious scenes began to play out across the city: Live rats ran around, but without tails.
It turns out that the hunters just amputated the tail instead of capturing a healthy rat, which is fertile and can produce many other mice – mice whose tails provide value. Some reports also indicate that Vietnamese people smuggle rats from abroad into the capital. The last drop of water when health inspectors discovered rat farms sprouting up on the outskirts of Hanoi.
Obviously, this is not the business sense that the French have in mind. The bounty was canceled, the inhabitants of the city “resigned” the hunter to live with the rats.
However, the French correctly judged the cause of the spread of the plague. In 1906, with rats left in the sewers, an epidemic broke out in Hanoi. At least 263 people died, most of them Vietnamese. Meanwhile, Doumer had returned to France, where he was hailed as the most effective Governor-General of Indochina at that time. Then he became the president of France.
“It is a moral story about the arrogance of modern people, when they put too much faith in science and reason, using business to solve all problems. This is also the mindset that led to World War I – the leaders thought that machine guns were so effective that they would end the war quickly. What really happened was a protracted war, where a lot of people died,” Vann said.
Today, the rat massacre in Hanoi is considered a prime example of the “cobra effect,” an economic theory that suggests that encouraging something in a complex system can lead to negative consequences. unpredictable consequences.
“Be wary of programs created in situations where arrogance is so evident and the power disparity is so great, where obvious signs of problems can be ignored,” the historian draws. out lesson.
In 1997, Vann went to Vietnam to research documents on the rat massacre. One day, he reached out to the top drawer containing documents in French before 1954 and felt a mouse gliding across his hand. It has been a long time since the French withdrew from Vietnam, rats still exist.
By page Psychology TodayThe term “Cobra Effect” was coined by the German economist Horst Siebert, originating in British India. The British government at the time was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, so offered a reward for each cobra caught and killed.
The strategy was successful at first, but then many people thought of increasing their income by raising cobras. When the government discovered, the bounty program was canceled, the wild cobra population continued to expand.