Beware of an all-too flammable solution

In the 2008 film, The Dark Knight, Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman's butler, speaks about his time 'working with' the colonial government in Burma to capture a marauding bandit who had hidden himself in a forest north of Rangoon. Bruce asks Alfred whether they finally managed to catch the bandit. 'Yes.' 'How?' 'We burned the forest down.' This variation of 'throwing the (bad) baby out with the bathwater' has been used by the likes of Thomas Friedman, who recommended against 'burning the forest down' in the US engaging with 'decent' West Asian countries - rather than detaching wholesale with the region. Last week, burning down the forest to sniff out an unwanted returned to its literal form when a homeowner burnt his house down to get rid of snakes harbouring inside it. As they say, oops.

The house in Maryland may not have been a forest, but it was a nearly 10,000 sq ft sprawl its owner had bought for a Bruce Wayne-ish $1.8 million. In an attempt to smoke the snake infestation out, he used burning coal - placed too close to flammable objects - inadvertently burning his mansion down. The damages are estimated to be over $1 million. So what is the moral of this story? To solve a problem, best to use a band-aid rather than bandit-capturing strategies that may have unintended consequences. In other words, call pest control.