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Vintage DOG TAGs - Baltimore County, MD - Original - $10 (Springfield, VA)
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Dog licenses and the practice of taxing tags have a long and international history. Dog licenses were documented in Utrecht, Holland, as early as 1446, and there is evidence that dogs were taxed in Germany by 1598. One of the oldest known surviving dog licenses dates from 1775 and is from Rostock, Germany. The oldest known American dog license tag is an 1853 Corporation of Fredericksburg (Virginia) medallion.
With the rise of middle-class pet ownership in the nineteenth century, the bureaucracy involved with dog licensing expanded and the appearance and design of the tags and licenses themselves became more involved. The earliest form was paper dog licenses. They came in a variety of colors, with details of the dog being licensed on the front; sometimes a printed image of a dog appeared as well. Paper licenses (from Massachusetts) were issued as early as the late 1840s. An 1899 Southborough, Mass., paper license fee was a whopping two dollars for one dog--a very high price for that era, and evidence of the value people placed on their pets.
The next step, toward the end of the 19th century, was metal license tags, those familiar collar accessories that so often announce a dog's presence with a cheery clink. At least 16 countries are known to have issued metal tags before 1900, but these are extremely rare; the most commonly found tags date from the 1940s on. Brass, copper, tin and aluminum were popular for tags, and many old metal tags have acquired handsome, well-worn patinas.
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