20 Outlandish Historical Facts That Actually Exist

1. The Snake Eradication Plan That Disastrously Backfired

British India’s rulers were worried when Delhi became infested with venomous cobras, so they offered a bounty for dead cobras, payable upon delivery of their skin to designated officials. Before long, natives were thronging to the drop off points, whose store rooms were soon bulging with cobra skins. However, the city’s cobra population remained unchanged, no matter how many cobra skins were delivered to the authorities. Officials eventually figured out why: many locals had turned to farming cobras. Since the bounty on the snake skin was greater than the cost of raising a cobra, the British had unintentionally created a new cash crop.

So the authorities cancelled the plan, and stopped paying out bounties for cobra skins. That made things worse. Without the bounties, cobra skins and captive cobras became worthless. So Delhi’s cobra farmers did the economically sensible thing, and released the snakes back into the wild – the “wild” in this case being the city of Delhi. The infestation grew by orders of magnitude, and Delhi wound up with many times more cobras than it had possessed before the authorities launched their ill advised plan.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Vespasian

Ancient Origins – Sarah Wilson: The Trickster Who Rose From Convict to Princess

Atlas Obscura – The Great French Moustache Strike of 1907

Bakewell, Michael and Melissa – Augusta Leigh: Byron‘s Half Sister (2000)

Civil War Saga – Child Soldiers in the Civil War

Cracked – 5 Forgotten Historical Facts That Prove the Past‘s Crazy AF

Encyclopedia Britannica – John of Bohemia

Epoch Times, October 5^th, 2013 – Chinese Idioms: Borrowing Arrows With Thatched Boats

Esoterx – Bad Habits: The 15^th Century Biting Nun Mania

Irish Times, September 12^th, 2017 – Fake Smiles and False Teeth: A History of Dental Pain