I

On 5 April 1796, John Dent, MP for Lancaster, introduced a bill in parliament to impose a tax on dogs.Footnote ¹ Whilst some of his fellow MPs greeted the idea with contempt and mockery, others took it more seriously; a vigorous debate in the Commons ensued, and though Dent's bill failed, an act to tax dogs was passed the next month. Hitherto, the act has been seen as little more than a trivial side note to history – just one of the government's many attempts to find sources of revenue in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ² After all, this was not the first time that the government had regulated dogs: prohibitions against ownership of certain kinds of dogs dated back to the middle ages, and dog taxes survive today in many places, in the common practice of requiring owners to purchase a licence. Yet such regulations are usually the purview of local, rather than central, governments; it is worth exploring in greater detail the convergence of circumstances that made a national dog tax seem not merely conceivable, but desirable.

Dent's bill was the culmination of a series of proposals that began in the 1730s. A tax on dogs seemed to many a useful way to address serious social and economic problems, and a variety of pamphlets and correspondence in contemporary periodicals discussed the idea. Abortive attempts to pass legislation also occurred sporadically, with bills introduced in parliament in 1755, 1761, and 1776.Footnote ³ But the dog tax cannot be understood simply as a revenue generator; the fact that dogs are animals, not merely consumer goods, and that they serve a wide variety of functions in human society, meant that the debates over this tax engaged with issues not raised by proposals for other kinds of taxes. Dogs are hunters, workers, status symbols, and companions, and the arguments surrounding the tax addressed all of those roles. The positions of advocates and opponents of a dog tax depended largely on assumptions about the purpose that dogs served, or ought to serve. A close examination of the debates over a dog tax thus illuminates not only eighteenth-century attitudes towards the responsibility of the government to regulate its citizens' purchases and pastimes, but also the changing relationship between humans and the natural world.

For most of the eighteenth century, dog tax proposals were dominated by two central reforming impulses: game law reform and moral reform. The first two sections of this article will discuss how those respective reform movements affected debates over a dog tax. Dogs were already subject to government regulation through game laws, and those laws faced increasing criticism; in one view, a dog tax would fix the weaknesses of the game laws whilst simultaneously raising revenue. For others, it was not the game laws but public morality that was the problem; those advocates assumed that dogs were a useless extravagance and sought a luxury tax aimed at reducing the wasteful expenditure of time and money on dogs. When a tax was finally passed, however, it bore little resemblance to most eighteenth-century proposals, including Dent's, and the third section of this article looks in depth at the 1796 parliamentary debates to explain why the dog tax assumed the form it did. The specific shape of the act was the result of new ideas about the place of animals, especially pets, in human society.

Dent introduced his legislation with a variety of arguments in its favour. The bill would encourage a much-needed culling of dogs, release food for the poor, and prevent the massive destruction of livestock; Dent estimated, for example, that dogs killed 50,000 sheep each year.Footnote ⁴ ‘If carried into effect’, he promised, his tax ‘would lessen the poor-rates, render provisions more cheap and plentiful, diminish the instances of hydrophobia, and at the same time open a considerable source of revenue.’ His arguments reflected concerns shared by many contemporaries, who believed that England faced an increasing problem of nuisance dogs that attacked livestock. In the mid-1790s such anxieties were particularly acute since the country was experiencing a major grain shortage and widespread hunger; there was a persistent sense that existing poor relief was not providing adequate remedy, and food riots erupted across England in protest against rising prices and shortages.Footnote ⁵ In this context, the nation could ill afford to lose precious livestock to uncontrolled dogs. Moreover, some tax proponents argued that dogs owned by the wealthy deprived the poor of food in two other ways: dogs ate the offal and grains that would otherwise be consumed by the poor and, by reducing supply, drove up food prices.

Support for a dog tax was also related to fears regarding a perceived epidemic of rabies in the late eighteenth century, although it is difficult now to gauge whether such fears were justified.Footnote ⁶ As early as 1740, William King had suggested rabies as one reason to limit dog ownership, and by the 1790s, fears of ‘hydrophobia’ were central to the discussion.Footnote ⁷ In 1791, for example, George Clark argued that ‘the first and greatest of … evils’ caused by dogs was canine madness, and he offered an extensive discussion of families torn apart by agonizing deaths as a result of the disease.Footnote ⁸ A year later the Gentleman's Magazine published an open letter from C. Loraine Smith encouraging others to join in calling for a tax to reduce the number of dogs because of many ‘authenticated instances of canine madness’.Footnote ⁹ Edward Barry, a doctor, similarly presented ‘Hydrophobia’ as the primary reason to support a tax aimed at destroying dogs.Footnote ¹⁰ The pro-tax petitions to parliament that began appearing in large numbers in 1791 and 1792 usually mentioned mad dogs as their primary concern, reflecting perceptions that the disease was rapidly spreading. Warwickshire petitioners in February 1791, for instance, claimed that they ‘lately had their Attention particularly called to this Subject by the alarming Increase of Mad Dogs in that Part of England where they reside’.Footnote ¹¹ Rabies rendered the dog tax a question of public health and the well-being of the entire nation: everyone would benefit from a reduction in the number of dangerous dogs.

From the government's perspective as well, the time was favourable for a dog tax. At war with France, facing serious political opposition within and outside parliament, and unwilling to raise the land tax, William Pitt's administration was looking for additional sources of revenue.Footnote ¹² As an added incentive, Dent proposed that his tax would go towards reducing parish poor rates, thus theoretically benefiting not only the government, but also the taxpayer. Given these circumstances, it may seem less surprising that a dog tax was passed than that anyone could have objected to it. The tax appeared to present an attractive solution to a variety of problems, and a broad constituency agreed that a tax was desirable, even if they differed about its ends. Yet all the arguments in favour of a tax were controversial. If agreement regarding the need to reform the game laws was widespread, there was just as much disagreement about the nature of such reform. Recommending a dog tax as a luxury tax created other problems since there was no consensus about which dogs counted as luxuries. By the end of the century, moreover, new attitudes towards pet keeping radically transformed the debate. Dent's explicit goal had been to tax all dogs with the aim of encouraging their widespread extermination; in its final form, however, the act explicitly distinguished certain kinds of dogs – and certain kinds of owners – from others, and acknowledged that even the most apparently ‘useless’ pets had value.

II

For most of the eighteenth century, discussions of a tax on dogs were inseparable from ideas about the game laws, a complex web of regulations about who could hunt, where one could hunt, and what one could hunt, designed to maintain the sport as the privilege of the elite.Footnote ¹³ The laws included various restrictions on dog ownership. For instance, the first game act, passed in 1389 under Richard II, specifically referred to the tendency of ‘butchers, shoemakers, tailors, and other low persons, [to] keep greyhounds and other dogs’ for hunting, and forbade anyone with land worth less than 40s a year from owning such dogs. Those with less property had to ‘law’ their sporting dogs by amputating some of their claws to make it impossible for them to chase game.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, the practice of lawing dated back to William the Conqueror's time, when the king had ordered that dogs kept near the royal forests be lawed.Footnote ¹⁵ The Game Act of 1671 specifically empowered lords of manors to appoint gamekeepers who were authorized to search out and confiscate sporting dogs as well as other equipment that might be used for poaching. JPs also engaged in the summary seizure and execution of dogs.Footnote ¹⁶ By the early eighteenth century, there were thus already serious restrictions on dog ownership by anyone not qualified to hunt, with penalties not only for poaching with dogs, but also for possessing dogs that might be used for poaching. But it also seemed clear to many observers that such restrictions were insufficient. For some advocates, a dog tax seemed a more effective way to limit unauthorized dog ownership and thus to prevent poaching.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, moreover, laws relating to hunting and poaching formed such a complicated patchwork that they were widely regarded as impossible for any individual to understand. Since many observers agreed that the laws were in drastic need of reform, some dog tax advocates explicitly presented their plans within the context of game law reform. Yet because the game laws embodied often contradictory ideas about class, traditional rights and privileges, and property, proponents of a dog tax who connected their proposals to the game laws did not necessarily agree about the nature of the problem the tax would supposedly solve. Historians have noted that the game laws created unusual fissures and alliances within rural society; landowners who did not quite meet the hunting qualification, for instance, might well sympathize or even collude with landless poachers. Moreover, because non-landed wealth was explicitly excluded from the qualification, wealthy urban dwellers could also find common cause with small farmers.Footnote ¹⁷ Precisely because of the complexity and contradictions of the game laws, the positions of authors who related a dog tax to the game laws varied widely.

Commentators frequently complained that the existing laws did little to achieve the goal of preserving game, and suggested that a dog tax would be more effective. Some hoped for a tax aimed squarely at the poor, with the design of making it financially impossible for them to keep dogs. For these people, laws that addressed only hunting missed the real problems caused by dogs. A correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1750, for instance, remarked that, in times past, he could hardly fail to spring ‘a brace or two’ of pheasants every time he went out, but that they and the partridges in his area were now almost ‘entirely destroy'd’. Rather than blaming over-hunting, however, he placed the responsibility on ‘those ugly mungrels kept by the poor and common people’. Since their owners could not afford to feed them adequately, the dogs inevitably followed their masters into the fields and fed upon the eggs and young of game birds.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, William King blamed the ‘little whiffling Curs’ of the poor for the widescale destruction of game bird eggs.Footnote ¹⁹ A tax on dogs would thus solve the problem by forcing the poor to give up their dogs.

These arguments emphasized the incidental destruction of game caused by inadequately regulated dogs. More often, however, discussions of the game laws, the poor, and a dog tax focused on poaching, just as previous legislation regarding dogs had done. In the view of many authors, poor men had an unfortunate tendency to neglect their proper duties for the illegitimate pursuit of game. One pro-tax writer complained in 1762 that ‘the lower sort of people … for above half of the year, do little else but follow [hounds], to the great neglect of trade and business, and impoverishment of themselves and families’. Echoing the language of the 1389 law, the author griped that the poaching of ‘Jack the taylor, Tom the shoemaker, and Will the weaver’ ruined his legitimate entertainment. Unless stronger deterrents were in place, he feared, such ‘idleness in the lower sort of people’ would ‘continue to usurp the gentleman's recreation’.Footnote ²⁰

Others agreed that there could only be one reason why a poor man would keep a dog: to assist in poaching. A dog tax would thus be the best way of preventing poaching because it would eliminate the means to do so. Since many proponents of the tax also agreed that poaching was an entry to other, more pernicious crimes, they saw it as particularly important to crack down on illegal hunting.Footnote ²¹ King even argued that there was an additional benefit to such a tax. Unrestricted dog ownership allowed poachers to go undetected, he said; but if a dog tax were implemented, a labourer or artisan who paid the tax would immediately raise suspicions among his neighbours, since poaching could be the only motive for doing so. It would then be easier to identify and punish unqualified sportsmen.Footnote ²² Those who perceived inadequate enforcement as the greatest flaw of the game laws thus promoted a tax that would make it prohibitively expensive for the poor to keep dogs. Behind these ideas lay the assumption that dogs were for hunting and that hunting was a recreation suitable only to the leisured elite. In the words of Edward Barry, there were really only two reasons to own a dog – ‘protection, and sport’ – and since the poor had little property to protect and no right to hunt, they could not be justified in keeping dogs. A tax would thus encourage the only moral option for the poor: getting rid of their dogs.Footnote ²³ Logically, Barry proposed that ‘Sporting dogs’ should actually be taxed at a lower rate than all other canines, since those dogs, which could legally be owned only by those qualified to hunt, should, by definition, be in the hands of those with an interest in preserving game.Footnote ²⁴ New regulations aimed at the poor were, from the viewpoint of qualified sportsmen, a simple, cost-effective, and painless remedy for the defects of the existing game laws.

Advocates of a tax on dogs who associated it with the game laws thus presented a simple dichotomy between the legitimate hunting of landed gentlemen and the poaching of the landless poor. Those who did not, however, accept this distinction reflected some of the social divisions created by the game laws. In a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1735, ‘Frank Farmers’ argued, as later writers would, that damage to stocks of game was primarily caused by the dogs of the poor. Although his solution was also a tax that would make it financially impossible for labourers to keep dogs, his discontent was not limited to annoyance with indigent poachers. He opposed the game laws themselves, and regarded the tax as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, the existing system. He complained that he would be ‘severely trounced’ for shooting a single ‘Snipe or Woodcock for my longing Wife’, whilst the gamekeeper of his ‘next great Neighbour’ could ‘load his Table with Game, and some to spare for your Town Poulterers’.Footnote ²⁵ The laws were thus inherently unfair because they prohibited him from hunting, whilst also failing to achieve their stated goal of preserving the game. In his view, the solution to the problem was to repeal the unjust regulations, allow him his legitimate hunting, and use a tax to stop the real threat to the game. Such a plan would not only penalize those who deserved it, but would have the added advantage of encouraging people to report violators, whereas the current game laws were so draconian that people were unwilling to bring such penalties upon another's head.Footnote ²⁶ His letter thus reflected the resentment felt by many farmers against the game laws. The author sought to reform what he saw as an artificial division created by the act between groups whose interests should be the same; his goal was to reinstate what he saw as the natural alliance between the landed interests with a right to hunt, against the landless labourers.

If ‘Frank Farmers’ agreed with those who claimed that the dogs of rural labourers represented the primary threat to stocks of game, a later correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine placed the blame elsewhere. This author insisted that the poor were not the main cause of the problem, and that they would be unaffected by a tax on dogs they could not afford in the first place. Instead, culpability lay with ‘young fellows just entered into business, attorney's clerks, and apprentices’ who clubbed together to purchase packs of hounds. The solution was ‘a heavy tax upon dogs’ of £10 a year for privately held packs, and twice as much for packs ‘kept by subscription’.Footnote ²⁷ Like other proposals for a tax, this argument contained status-based assumptions about who had the right to hunt. Rather than a rural patrician–plebeian divide, however, this author perceived a distinction between the legitimate activities of rural gentlemen, who had an investment in nurturing the land, and the carelessness of urban upstarts, who had money but no ties to the land. His position thus reflected one concern of the 1671 Game Act, which prohibited any non-landed person, however wealthy, from pursuing game. But not all animals that could be hunted were technically considered game, a loophole from which such ‘young fellows’ obviously benefited. Foxes were officially vermin, and the hunters in question were probably engaging in foxhunting.Footnote ²⁸ The specifics of this tax proposal, with its interest in packs of hounds, reflected the author's agenda. Those who saw labourers' dogs as the fundamental problem instead proposed large taxes on those dogs, or an outright ban on all dog ownership by such people.

Opponents of a dog tax also revealed fault lines in English society. ‘A Person without Eyes from His Birth’ published a pamphlet in 1763 in which he opposed a tax on the grounds that it was a form of class warfare. He did not see the tax as unfair to the poor or urban dwellers, however; instead, he argued that it was part of a conspiracy of great landowners to oppress smaller country squires. Like ‘Frank Farmers’, he saw the existing game laws as unfair, but he did not trust that a dog tax would solve the problem. In his view, the tax proposal was the latest move aimed at preventing small landholders from being able to hunt at all – a goal that he explicitly tied to political tyranny. In places like ‘the Kingdoms, little Principalities, Bishopricks, and footy Dukedoms of … Germany’, for instance, it was illegal for any subject to hunt, a petty tyranny that reflected a greater one: ‘And not only the Game but the People themselves, are the property of the great Men.’ The author was certain that ‘tho’ not in the printed Plan it is in the Heads and Hearts of the Abettors of it, to suffer no Man of less than three Hundred Pounds a Year in Land to enter any sporting Dog at all'. Giving power to local authorities to enforce such a law would create a slippery slope, and eventually English subjects would lose all their liberties.Footnote ²⁹ Passing the dog tax, which, in his view, was only a thinly disguised attempt to destroy the hunting privileges of all but the great magnates, would thus destroy the happiness of many in order to secure the tyranny of a few. Whilst such a view may seem farfetched, the existing game laws were already the subject of much criticism on similar grounds. The gamekeepers who were appointed by large landowners and who had the power to enforce the game laws were frequently perceived as arbitrary and tyrannical in wielding their authority.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, JPs could exercise summary judgement in punishing accused poachers. From the perspective of tenant farmers and others who felt that they had been unfairly deprived of their traditional right to hunt, it was a logical move to suspect that other rights might be removed just as easily and a new regime enforced just as tyrannically.Footnote ³¹

Debates about the dog tax were thus closely related to conflicts over the game laws, but the relationship between these interests was complex. The difficulty of drawing a clear line between advocacy of a dog tax and resentment against the game laws becomes evident when considering the circumstances of the 1796 parliamentary debates. By the end of the century, opposition to the game laws was fierce, and it may not have been coincidental that a bill to reform the game laws was introduced in parliament just a month before Dent made his proposal for a dog tax. Yet the former, introduced by John Christian Curwen in March 1796, failed, and game law reform had to wait until the nineteenth century. Curwen's proposal was not particularly radical – it would have maintained many restrictions on hunting – but in proposing the reform he argued that the legislature must be willing to conform to the will of the people or risk a violent reaction. As P. B. Munsche has shown, Curwen thus associated game law reform with radical sympathies. Opponents responded by defeating the bill, citing its potentially dangerous effect on the social order and the temptation it would create to lure farmers away from their work.Footnote ³² In this context, some MPs might have seen a dog tax as a way to solve the worst of the problems associated with the game laws without raising the opposition associated with an alternative kind of reform. But when Dent introduced his bill for a dog tax in April 1796, his speech made no mention of the game laws or poaching, and it is unlikely that his bill would have received a hearing had there not been other compelling reasons to consider a dog tax. Indeed, it is possible that Curwen's attempt at game law reform, with its whiff of Continental radicalism, actually prevented fellow MPs from using criticisms of the game laws to justify the tax. In the lengthy debates over the tax, no one explicitly referred to the game laws; only two MPs even mentioned poaching, one of whom raised it to refute the idea that a tax on poor men's dogs would do anything to prevent poaching.Footnote ³³ One of the most important justifications employed by dog tax proponents throughout the century thus had remarkably little impact on the debate over the tax when it finally reached parliament. In the end, other issues came to dominate, and the final act did little to address the concerns of game law reform advocates.

III

If the dog tax cannot be explained simply as game law reform, then what other concerns animated tax proponents? The use to which advocates suggested putting the tax sheds light on another aspect of these debates. Throughout the eighteenth century, most argued that the tax should go toward reducing the poor rates, a proposal that indicates the extent to which a dog tax engaged issues of social status beyond the question of hunting privileges. There were two purported benefits of applying the dog tax toward poor relief: tax collection could be accommodated within the current system of overseers of the poor, and the tax itself would, in the words of one advocate, go toward ‘alleviating what lies very heavy on most parishes, the poor's rate’.Footnote ³⁴ Any gentleman must support a plan, said ‘Frank Farmers’, which so neatly combined philanthropy and self-interest: ‘the paying a little Charity-Money for his Pleasure, will encrease it, and much lessen his poor Rates’.Footnote ³⁵ The justification for applying the tax to the poor rates frequently relied on the idea that dogs were an unaffordable luxury for the poor who should have been using their limited resources to feed their families, but the issue of luxury in turn opened a variety of new perspectives. If dogs were a luxury, then for whom? What distinguished a useful, working dog from a useless luxury? And who should pay the price for such luxuries?

Some writers insisted that a dog tax would not only help fund poor relief, but would also reduce the number of people needing such relief by forcing them to forego the expense of caring for dogs.Footnote ³⁶ Barry suggested that, in addition to a tax on dogs, there should be regulations requiring poor law overseers to refuse assistance to anyone who kept a dog.Footnote ³⁷ Behind such ideas lay the assumption that charity was being wasted on the undeserving poor. Writers like Barry thus justified their desire to minimize their own contributions to poor relief with a moral argument, and discussions of the application of dog tax revenue shifted arguments from the realm of sporting rights to that of morality. Thomas Gilbert's recommendation in 1786 was for a slightly different scheme, but with similar ends. He proposed entirely replacing the Elizabethan poor law with a new set of laws – including taxes on dogs, alehouses, and those who used toll roads on Sundays – aimed at improving the morals and work habits of the nation. He recommended that county officials use the revenue to build hospitals and facilities to house and educate poor children; whatever remained could go to the government to compensate for the income it would lose because of a presumed reduction in the number of alehouses.Footnote ³⁸ Gilbert's proposal thus made explicit another aspect of the arguments in favour of taxing dogs: it would be a sort of ‘sin tax’ akin to other methods of discouraging immoral behaviour and idleness.

Although not everyone presented the tax as a penalty on misguided dog owners, many did suggest that the poor starved themselves in order to feed their dogs. Wasting limited resources on undeserving animals reflected their inability to set sensible priorities. In one sense, then, the dog tax could be seen as saving the poor from themselves as well as saving the pocketbooks of their betters. This view of the lower orders was common. As early as 1710, Daniel Hilman referred to the

At the other end of the century, George Morland's painting of The miseries of idleness (1790) depicted a dog competing for a bone with a boy in rags, in the hovel of a wastrel and his overdressed wife.Footnote ⁴⁰ William King, writing in 1740 in support of a dog tax, was thus drawing on familiar ideas as he insisted that, even when food was scarce, labourers and beggars wasted it on dogs. ‘This is one of the Inconveniencies, which arise from suffering all Men to have full and free Liberty to keep as many of these useless Animals as they please’, he said, ‘even tho’ they want Bread for the Support of their Families.'Footnote ⁴¹ In 1791, Clark also complained that dogs consumed the low-quality grains and offal that would otherwise feed the poor, thus creating scarcity and raising the price of food. Moreover, ‘the poor themselves join in promoting this evil’ by keeping dogs and feeding them ‘part of the poor child's dole’. Even when children were not deprived, dogs consumed food that might otherwise go to support ‘more useful animals’ like pigs.Footnote ⁴² A correspondent to The Times agreed that a dog consumed as much as a child, but suggested that it was poor children who voluntarily shared their food with dogs: ‘the cur and the child know but one platter or porringer, whenever the parent is not within observation. Hence, the consumption of what should be the proportion of a child, and not of a dog, out of a poor man's earnings.’Footnote ⁴³

Even those who entertained a more positive attitude toward the poor could suggest that a dog tax would help the lower orders set more sensible priorities. Charles Varlo, a farmer and agricultural inventor, acknowledged the attachment that poor people could feel for dogs, but denied that it was sufficient reason for allowing them to keep animals they could not afford. Poor people with dogs had three choices, he claimed: to starve the dogs, to let them loose to worry sheep, or to feed the dogs the ‘bread and butter’ that would otherwise go to their children. Despite the seemingly obvious result, many a poor man chose to keep ‘a dog for his children to play with’ instead of, for instance, a pig that would feed them all.

Varlo presented himself as sympathetic to the poor, but agreed with the dominant view that they could not be trusted to determine their own financial destinies. Like ladies who over-indulged their lapdogs, indigent parents would bow to the foolish demands of their children, even when doing so went against everyone's best interests.

Whilst poor people's financial irresponsibility thus made a tempting target for dog tax advocates, the rhetoric of luxury and morality could also be used in other ways to criticize the rich as well as the poor. Having referred to the mistaken sentiments of the poor, Varlo turned to problems caused by the wealthy. He avoided directly criticizing elite dog owners, admitting that they could easily afford the 20s shillings a year he calculated it cost to feed an average dog. ‘But, though such things be not felt by people in affluence yet, be assured, it hurts the public in general’ since such behaviour increases the demand for victuals and thus also their price, ‘and a half-penny, or a farthing in a pound, in either meat or bread, is very sensibly felt by the lowest sort of people’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In a 1757 letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, ‘Colonus’ likewise claimed that it was the rich landowner who overfed his dogs whilst the poor suffered: ‘What large wooden or stone troughs or trays have I seen filled with the soup of the best meat in the shambles, given to dogs, whilst the poor starveling tenant, with a longing eye, would have rejoiced to have joined in the banquet!’Footnote ⁴⁶ The Public Advertiser agreed; dogs were

In this view, it was not the luxurious living of the poor that was the problem, but the conspicuous consumption of the rich.

Such ideas not only located the source of society's ills away from the poor; they also targeted different dogs. As seen, Barry proposed taxing sporting dogs at a lower rate than other breeds because his explicit goal was to reduce the population of nuisance dogs, which he believed to be owned primarily by the lower orders. But the rhetoric of luxury could shift those priorities. For some, all hunting dogs were worthy of taxation because they, like horses ‘kept for diversion’, were luxuries. One writer suggested in 1785 that packs of dogs should be taxed at several pounds per year and that each sporting dog should cost its owner a guinea or more each year. The author was careful to point out that such an approach would prove no burden to the poor.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thomas Gilbert also singled out hunting dogs for special taxation in his proposal, which, as seen, was intended to reduce luxury and vice.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dent drew on these ideas when, in proposing his 1796 bill, he insisted that dogs epitomized the luxurious self-indulgence of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. He cited examples of gentlemen who spent £400–£800 a year on grain to feed their dogs, noted the massive expense of packs of fox-hounds (he estimated the annual cost at £1,000–£2,000), and insisted that the bread of the poor was in effect stolen to feed the dogs of landowners.Footnote ⁵⁰ Speaking in favour of Dent's bill, Edmund Lechmere agreed that the tax should be enforced against the wealthy: ‘He trusted it would be of service to the public at large, and particularly to the poor at this time of scarcity. Gentlemen who kept a pack of fox hounds, ought to be compelled to pay high for them.’Footnote ⁵¹ In this view, hunting was a privileged entertainment, deserving of taxation like other luxuries. If, for those who saw poaching as the central problem, a tax on the dogs of the poor would be the solution, men like Lechmere wanted to use the same method to achieve the opposite goal. Treat sporting dogs like the expensive accoutrements they are, and tax their owners accordingly.

Behind these discussions, then, lay central questions about dog ownership: was owning a dog a luxury or a necessity? Under what circumstances was it acceptable to own a dog? Many of those who argued in favour of a tax believed that dogs were, by and large, luxuries, and could thus be taxed like other luxuries. Clark made the case explicitly; luxuries were the only legitimate objects of taxation, he said: ‘and that the keeping of Dogs is generally a species of luxury no one will attempt to deny. The fact is notorious, that there are more Dogs kept in this country from fancy, or for pleasure, than from necessity.’ Although they ‘are no doubt faithful domestics and cheerful companions’, Clark added, ‘this by no means makes them necessaries’.Footnote ⁵² But questions about the circumstances under which a dog owner might be excused from paying the tax reveal the difficulty of determining just where luxury ends and necessity begins. Clark, for instance, proposed that exemptions could be provided in those cases where people were obliged to own dogs; in all other cases, however, dogs were as legitimate subjects of taxation as horses, houses, and hats, all of which were currently taxed.Footnote ⁵³ King similarly argued that certain groups of dog owners should be exempt from the tax. He offered to excuse all owners of land worth £10 a year, as well as ‘Tanners, Curriers, Fellmongers, Butchers, and the like’, whose trades required a dog. Everyone else, and all those who owned more than one dog, would be subject to the tax.Footnote ⁵⁴ Others suggested that it was not the kind of dog, but their number that transformed dog ownership from necessity to luxury. ‘Publicola’, writing to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1762, argued that a single dog in each household should be taxed at a mere shilling, which he suggested would be within most people's financial reach; ‘farmers, shepherds, or even cottagers’ could also justify the ownership of one dog. But more than one dog ‘may, I think, very well be put upon the foot of luxury; the proper subject of a tax even in times of profound peace’ – and he believed that each additional dog should be taxed at three or even four times that rate.Footnote ⁵⁵

Unlike the dog tax as game law reform, the luxury tax arguments succeeded in 1796. By the late eighteenth century, there was already a well-established practice of taxing luxuries, from men-servants to hair powder. Combined with the specific circumstances of the period – widespread food shortages, anxieties about rabies, and a government interested in raising revenue wherever it could be found – the dog tax as luxury tax won sufficient support for passage. But presenting a tax on dogs as a luxury tax clearly created as many problems as it solved, and there were deep divisions over how to define a dog as a ‘luxury’. The parliamentary debates over Dent's bill reveal these divisions and thereby explain why the tax assumed the peculiar form it finally did.

IV

The specific definition of a ‘luxury’ dog in the 1796 act was shaped by both long- and short-term factors. Dent argued that all dogs were luxuries, robbing the poor of desperately needed food in a time of severe shortage. But his bill failed. Influenced by larger cultural currents that had transformed ideas about pets and other animals by the end of the eighteenth century, the tax that ultimately passed radically altered his notion of dog as luxury. George Clark was already responding to such cultural shifts when in 1791 he exclaimed against ‘False principles of humanity, and absurd or ridiculous attachments’ in favour of ‘sacrifice of private interest to public good’. A dog tax, he insisted, ‘has nothing but false impressions of tenderness, absurd and ridiculous attachments, or sordid self-interest, to oppose it’.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was perfectly clear ‘that Dogs are, upon the whole, pernicious and destructive animals’.Footnote ⁵⁷ By the 1790s, however, such views were in the minority. The rise of sensibility, with its emphasis on emotion and closeness to nature, was associated with new attitudes toward animals. Two distinct, but related, changes directly affected the dog tax debates: the rise of the anti-cruelty movement, and a new appreciation for the strong emotional connections people could feel for their pets.

Scholars have noted the development of a movement favouring more humane treatment of animals, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Not all anti-cruelty advocates had the same agenda: some focused their attention on work animals, some criticized traditional entertainments like bull-baiting, and some lamented the use of animals in scientific experiments. Their motives also differed. Moral arguments about self-discipline and time management co-existed uneasily with sentimental appeals on behalf of suffering beasts. Nevertheless, those who advocated kindness to animals frequently focused their attention on the lower classes since they were ostensibly the people most likely to abuse animals.Footnote ⁵⁹ Cruelty was also often linked to popular disorder and idleness: the poor, it was thought, abused animals out of ignorance, but also because they had the opportunity to do so. Eliminating idleness and encouraging labour discipline would create a more moral population of poor people who would no longer have either the opportunity or the inclination for abuse.Footnote ⁶⁰

The impact of anti-cruelty efforts should not be overstated; animal abuse continued, and co-ordinated agitation for humane treatment was often ineffective. It was not until the nineteenth century, for instance, that bull-baiting was finally outlawed, long after the practice itself had largely disappeared.Footnote ⁶¹ But rhetoric insisting on humane treatment of animals was widespread. In this context, the claim that the lower orders wasted their food on dogs could be modified to suggest that they intentionally deprived their animals of food and imposed other cruelties on them. It was but a short step from complaining about the poor taking food from their children in order to sustain their dogs, to suggesting that the poor also starved their dogs. Barry, for instance, argued that most dogs were owned by the poor, and that those unfortunate animals were ‘all but starved, through the indigence, and the cruelty, of their owners!’ This was a terrible fate for a species known for its ‘fidelity, docility, and great affection’. A tax preventing poor people from owning dogs would thus be of benefit to dogs, given that the poor were famously abusive to animals:

Passing a tax on dogs, Barry thus argued, would not only help society; it would actually help dogs. Ironically, he went on to emphasize that his goal was the extermination of dogs in order to reduce their numbers, but he insisted that allowing the poor to own dogs was simply a licence for abuse.Footnote ⁶³

Yet if tax supporters presented poor dog owners as engaging in cruelty, more MPs spoke against the 1796 bill than for it, some of whom saw the legislation itself as promoting cruelty. They had some reason for these views, given the publicly articulated hope of tax proponents like Barry and Dent that it would lead to the mass destruction of dogs. What, MPs wondered, would be the effect of such officially sanctioned murder? According to some, the dog tax would have a dangerous effect on the morals of the nation, heightening class antagonism and inuring the population to violence. Such arguments drew on the increasingly common idea that cruelty to animals was a step on a slippery slope to cruelty and barbarism against other humans, a view famously expressed in William Hogarth's Four stages of cruelty (1751).Footnote ⁶⁴ John Courtenay thus contrasted ‘the caresses, the playfulness, and the fidelity of dogs [which] endeared them to us’ with the dangers posed by their widespread extermination: ‘To accustom the people to look with hard-hearted indifference on the murder of these faithful animals, would debase their moral feelings.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Henry Penton similarly worried that ‘the hanging of dogs would familiarize the people to barbarity’ – barbarity that might well be directed at their social superiors. He remembered an incident from his own childhood when he witnessed a park keeper killing

Whilst tax proponents argued that allowing poor people to keep dogs was a licence for cruelty, opponents suggested that the bill itself actually legislated animal abuse and perhaps even encouraged worse behaviour.

The 1796 parliamentary debates also reflected the second major change in thinking about animals that took place in the late eighteenth century. Opposition to the dog bill reflected new attitudes toward the practice of pet keeping – attitudes apparent in William Windham's argument against the bill. He accepted the notion of a tax on sporting dogs ‘because they were a kind of luxury, and their owners could afford to pay’. But he regarded the idea of a tax on all dogs, explicitly intended to lead to their mass extermination, as deeply offensive. There were certainly times when dogs were nuisances, ‘but he should have been loth to have avenged himself upon the whole of the species, in consequence of a little temporary inconvenience’. Windham insisted that dogs consumed much less than others had estimated; and far from taking food away from the poor, they actually ate garbage that would otherwise become a greater problem than the dogs themselves. More important for Windham than such practical considerations, however, was the emotional attachment of man and dog:

Windham believed that estimates of the problems caused by poaching and sheep worrying had been exaggerated, but whatever their extent, such problems were outweighed by the pleasure the poor received from their dogs.Footnote ⁶⁷ Richard Brinsley Sheridan similarly argued in favour of the emotional connection between poor people and their dogs. If the lower orders loved their pets so much that in time of extreme scarcity they were willing to share what little food they had with their dogs, then ‘what was the conclusion, but that they would rather deprive themselves of some of the necessaries of life, than lose their faithful companions’.Footnote ⁶⁸ ‘Dogs’, echoed John Courtenay, ‘had always been the friends of man. They were celebrated in the writings of every poet; and in the Scriptures too, for they must all have read of Tobit's dog.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Such arguments reflected a new attitude toward pets in the late eighteenth century. For much of the century, pets – animals whose purpose was emotional companionship and entertainment, rather than work – were viewed with suspicion or simply not acknowledged at all. Erica Fudge has pointed out that ‘In the early modern English law there are three categories of animal: ferae naturae, wild animals; domitae naturae, domestic animals; and recreational animals, whose lack of a Latin name represents their lack of status in the face of the law.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Both Carl Linnaeus and Oliver Goldsmith followed tradition in categorizing dogs according to their service to humans, from turn-spits to hunting dogs. Listing the varieties identified by his predecessor Thomas Caius, Goldsmith added a few more such as the bulldog and the ‘Dutch mastiff’, and concluded with ‘a variety of lap-dogs, which, as they are perfectly useless, may be considered as unworthy of a name’.Footnote ⁷¹ This dismissal of ‘useless’ dogs was typical at the time. Although he and his contemporaries recognized that many people kept dogs purely as pets, they regarded such practices as at best pointless, if not downright immoral and wasteful.

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, attitudes were changing. A moralizing story from the period, for instance, reveals a very different perspective on ‘useless’ animals. A boy and his father give a shilling to a crippled soldier and are immediately accosted by ‘a sorry beggar woman’ who scolds them for wasting their charity on a man who will spend it on gin and his dog. ‘A beggar keep a dog!’ she cries, ‘What's that but robbing other people, who deserve assistance?’ But when the boy recounts the incident to his sister, she is outraged not by the soldier's dog but by the beggar woman's attitude: ‘no wonder if a soldier, exposed to all kinds of weather, should now and then drink a little gin, which he knows will warm him; and perhaps his dog was his last best friend, and the steady companion of all his bad days’.Footnote ⁷² Notably, the story does not suggest that the dog serves any useful purpose, not even protection. Instead, it emphasizes the dog's value as a ‘steady companion’ and loyal friend. It was this view that Windham reflected in his critique of the dog tax as an attack on the poor. The argument that the poor should lose their dogs because they did not need dogs is rejected here in favour of the recognition that an emotional bond with a pet could itself be an important aspect of human experience. Opponents of the bill thus mustered a range of appeals to emotion. To support a tax that would lead to the extermination of the canine population would be the worst sort of ingratitude, rewarding fidelity with death, removing one of the few pleasures the poor could afford, and coarsening the moral sentiments of the entire population.

Although such ideas correlated to the sort of paternalism that also fed Windham's opposition to the abolition of bull-baiting,Footnote ⁷³ what is most significant about these views is the rhetoric with which they were expressed. Concerns about cruelty or the emotional bonds between people and pets were virtually absent from discussions of a dog tax throughout the eighteenth century, but dominated the parliamentary debates at a time when other concerns such as game law reform vanished. These changes only make sense in the broader context of a transformation in the representation of animals, and their relationship to humans, in eighteenth-century society.

V

A dog tax was passed in May 1796. In its final form, however, it represented a compromise advocated by William Pitt. Dent had sought a tax of 2s 6d on every dog except guide dogs for the blind, hoping that such a tax would drastically reduce the canine population. His efforts resulted in widespread ridicule, earning him the permanent nickname ‘Dog Dent’ and, according to Robert Southey, causing people to send him ‘some hundred dead dogs packed up as game’ after the tax was passed.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pitt agreed that a tax was a good idea, but insisted that the law should distinguish between the poor and the wealthy, so that the latter would pay much more.Footnote ⁷⁵ Whereas Dent and other tax proponents advocated legislation explicitly to target the dogs of the poor and to encourage the mass killing of dogs, the final bill accommodated the moral and emotional arguments of Dent's opponents. All people who kept dogs that could be used for sport, as well as all those who owned two or more dogs, were charged 5s per dog. In other cases where there was just one dog and it was not a hunting dog, only those already subject to house or window taxes had to pay, and that tax was limited to 3s per dog. Instead of contributing to poor relief, the revenue was applied to the government's sinking fund set aside to repay the national debt.Footnote ⁷⁶ Pitt had transformed the legislation from a measure aimed at local problems of poverty and poaching, to a tax like those on other luxury consumer goods, applied toward the needs of a government at war.

This final version of the legislation thus embodied a number of important priorities. By focusing on dogs used for sport, it implicitly endorsed the notion that a tax on dogs should be a luxury tax. Taxing sporting dogs was aimed at the wealthy, who could most easily afford to pay for their diversions. The provision about multiple dogs drew on a different aspect of the luxury argument – one dog might be a necessity, but more represented an avoidable indulgence. More importantly, by distinguishing between households that paid other taxes and those that did not, the law embodied Pitt's concern that the poor should be protected from the tax. The bill protected the rights of the poor to own dogs, either for work or for the pure pleasure of emotional companionship, and, significantly, it did not distinguish between those two functions.

Supporters of a dog tax thus triumphed, in the obvious sense that a dog tax was passed. But given their justifications for such a law, theirs was a limited victory, even a pyrrhic one. Most supporters of the dog tax had argued on two grounds. First, they suggested that the lower orders had no legitimate reason to own a dog; any poor person who kept a dog was either sacrificing himself (or his children) for a ridiculous attachment, or had nefarious reasons for doing so. Poor dog owners were either fools or poachers. Second, tax proponents suggested that it would actually benefit the population at large by increasing the food supply (grain, offal, and livestock) whilst reducing rabies. This second argument depended, of course, on the presumption that the tax would lead to a massacre of the canine population as dog owners chose to kill their animals rather than pay taxes on them. Since most tax advocates also wanted to include a clause enabling anyone to confiscate and kill a dog not properly licensed with the authorities and to use the carcass for his own purposes, they assumed that this provision would add to the number of dogs being destroyed. Some of them even recalculated the projected tax revenue downward to reflect the presumed decimation of the dog population.Footnote ⁷⁷ In its final formation, however, the tax actually supported the views of the vocal minority who wanted a levy on the pastimes of the elite. It enabled the poor to keep dogs without penalty whilst taxing the hunting dogs of the landed elite at a higher rate than other breeds. Ultimately the government endorsed the view that dog ownership was a luxury for some, but not for all. Ironically, in the eyes of the law the dogs of the wealthy were luxuries, whilst for poor people, dogs – even ‘useless’ pets – were necessities that they could not live without.