In 1865, the French government began paying people to kill dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea, offering twenty-five francs for each animal. Officials introduced the reward to protect fisheries, because fishing communities believed dolphins were emptying the sea of fish and tearing their nets. A major review of bounty programmes, published in 2026, identifies it as the first recorded dolphin bounty. The story is an example of how people have tried to solve economic problems by paying citizens to kill wildlife, and of how often such schemes have produced consequences that nobody planned for. Here is what happened and what history teaches.
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