An interesting story concerning man's best friend from the May 23, 1908 NYT:

Before the arrival of President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay, L.I., for the summer, every stray dog in Oyster Bay, Locust Valle, Mill Neck, Glen Cove, Sea Cliff, and East Norwich is to be killed. There has never been before been any effort to rid these villages of stray curs. Nobody wanted the job of dog catcher at 25 cents a head, and the constables turned up their official noses at the suggestion thatthey should kill the dogs.

All this is changed now, however. The Town Board is offering $2 a piece for all dogs killed. A dog catcher is to be appointed in each of the fourteen election districts, and men are said to be tumbling over one another to get the jobs.

Labor supply curves are typically upward sloping, at least for a range of wages. In 2006 dollars, each dead dog had increased in value from $5.65 to $45.20. We don't receive any information on the number of dogs to be killed nor the number of people who are volunteering to be a dog catcher, but if the supply of labor was unitary elastic, one might expect a lot of dogs killed in the next few days: a 700% increase to be exact.

The dramatic increase in the price of each dead dog might have created a perverse incentive to find "strays" that weren't really strays. For instance, perhaps a dog that wanders off their owner's property by only a few feet immediately becomes a stray. If killed, turned in for the bounty, and immediately (or nearly immediately) destroyed, what recourse would the original owner of the dog have? It would seem difficult for the owner to prove anything.

Similar perverse incentives seem endemic to any "buy back" program, whether stray dogs, hand guns; indeed, anything deemed "bad" by the government/society. Buy-backs often have good intentions, but not every instance of whatever is being "bought back" is a negative situation, however, high enough prices would seem to encourage at least some to see a "good" situation turn into a "bad" situation. I wonder if anyone is familiar with evidence from gun buy-back programs that when initiated gun thefts increase?