I recently learned about a concept called the "Cobra Effect." It describes a situation where you implement measure B to achieve goal A, but people who don't care about goal A end up treating B as the goal itself. As a result, not only do you fail to achieve goal A, but you end up moving even further away from it.
Long ago, when Britain ruled India, many people were killed or disabled by wild cobras. To combat this, the British colonial government offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in.
However, cobras are actually quite docile unless provoked, and compared to something like a raccoon, they were relatively easy to keep. Today in Japan, nobody would breed dozens of dangerous raccoons just for a bounty, because the risk is too high. But the people of India at the time were extremely poor, and the cost of keeping cobras was low. All you needed was a pot or a bug cage for a room, and mice for food were everywhere.
To the Indians, it looked like a great business opportunity: the British were paying high prices for creatures that were certainly scary, but harmless if you were careful. Therefore, instead of actively hunting wild cobras, people just caught a few and started breeding them.
For the British colonial government, whose goal was to eradicate wild cobras, the rise of cobra farming was completely meaningless—they were just paying out bounties with no results. Naturally, the bounty system was abolished, and the Indians simply released all the massive numbers of cobras they had been farming.
As a result, the population of wild cobra and the number of people bitten actually increased.