 What do dolphins have to do with cobras? More than you might think. Back in the first years of the 20th century, Delhi, India had a lot of cobras slithering around and upsetting the sensibilities of the occupying British aristocracy. Wanting to reduce the cobra population, they thought, We should put a bounty on these things. I know. We'll pay people for every severed cobra tail they bring us. But cobras can live and breed without their tails, and it didn't take the locals long to figure out that they could get paid for a severed cobra tail without killing the cobra. Cobra breeding operations started up, and the number of cobras in Delhi actually increased. The results became so infamous that authority instituted pest control dubbed it the cobra effect. And this isn't just about snakes. The French occupation of Vietnam in the early 1900s had a similar problem. Sacre bleu. There's too many rats. We should put a bounty on these things. I know. We'll pay people for every severed rat tail they can bring us. As you may have guessed, the total number of rats in the area, albeit talus ones, increased. And as recently as 2007 in Fort Benning, Georgia, feral pigs became an issue. In what was the proposed solution? Bounty tail. You'll get the picture. As a result, there were a suspicious number of talus feral pigs running around in domestic pigs. We're also starting to mysteriously lose their tails. Ah, it's too bad. Those societies were so profit driven. Ah, but that's the thing. This isn't about society. It's about us, which brings me to dolphins. When a group of dolphins were trained to bring the trash and dead seagulls that would end up in their enclosures to their handlers in exchange for a treat for each piece of debris, one of them quickly learned to tear apart each piece of trash and gull to maximize the number of rewards. The other dolphins picked up on the scheme and then took it further, going so far as to hunt gulls and drag in nearby trash just so they could rip them apart to exchange the pieces for rewards. The moral of the story? It's not the intentions behind policy that affects people or animals' behavior. It's the incentives. And no matter the society or even species, that's always going to be the case. Hey, could you give me a ride? I've got a wedding to go to. Hey, folks, thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this, please check out fee.org for more educational content. Thank you.