A surviving photograph from the 1870s depicts Schnuppe at Dobermann’s feet – a small, vaguely terrier-sized creature who resembles no recognizable purebred we know today.īut Dobermann, who never kept stud records, was not concerned with good looks his overarching criterion was a dog with the guts and drive to stand up to anything that dared challenge it. One of those, presumably, was “Schnuppe,” a relatively smooth-coated, reportedly mouse-gray female. Together, they bred their first litters from dogs that reportedly were supposed to have been skinned. When he first set out to create the breed that would posthumously be bestowed his name, Dobermann worked with two other local dog aficionados: fellow night watchman Herr Rebel and Herr Stegmann, who often journeyed to Switzerland with his butcher’s dogs to purchase cattle. Brilliantly cross-pollinating his customs and canine careers, Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann created the breed that today bears his name, the Doberman Pinscher. That was the case with a certain late-19 th-Century entrepreneur from Apolda, Germany, who also was a night watchman, dog catcher, and – shades of that Twain quote – flayer, or skinner, of dogs. As a result, many tax collectors maintained other livelihoods as well.
Though demanding work, tax collecting often was not a full-time job, particularly in smaller cities and villages. Not surprisingly, as they made their rounds, tax collectors worried about their personal safety: They were not only at risk of blows from angry constituents who disputed their assessments or just plain didn’t want to hand over any part of their income, but they were also tempting targets for criminals all too eager to separate them from their hard-won tithes.
And while today we pay the piper with electronic transfers or, less and less, paper checks by mail, a century ago that unpleasant task fell to the tax collector. In our polarized times, in which once-incontrovertible facts have become matters of opinion, one certainty remains: Nobody likes to pay taxes. “What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax assessor?” Mark Twain once asked, before answering with his customary wryness: “The taxidermist takes only your skin.”
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