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Dog licensing in the U.S. was addressed in the 1700s with several states passing laws to control dogs and collect taxes to reimburse livestock owners for acts of dog depredation.
These funds so collected were used to indemnify farmers for the loss of sheep, pigs and fowl killed by dogs.
In 1752 the colony of Virginia enacted "An Act for preserving the breed of Sheep" and it contained the following provision:
"And whereas dogs frequently ramble from home and destroy great numbers of sheep, and some persons are so un-neighborly as to refuse their being killed; Be it enacted, by the Lieutenant Governor, Council and Burgesses of this present General Assembly, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That it shall and may be lawful for any justice of the peace, upon due proof made to him, of any dog killing sheep, to order such dog destroyed forthwith".
These early laws spoke to the problem of the dog as a nuisance and made provisions to reimburse the owners for damage so inflicted. However, no mention was made of a dog license tag.
In 1864 Massachusetts passed a law requiring every owner or keeper of a dog to cause it to be annually registered, numbered, described, and licensed in the office of the clerk of the city or town wherein the owner resided. A penalty was established for keeping a dog contrary to these provisions.
A license certificate with serial number was issued and "the owner or keeper of every dog so licensed, shall cause it to wear around its neck a collar distinctly marked with its owner's name and registered number."
Most of the Northeastern states followed this procedure and virtually no pre-1900 tags are known from that area. The lack of dog tags is compensated by the wealth of dog license certificates with early certificates dating from the 1850s. They were in regular use into the early part of the 1900s.
Dog license certificates have preserved more information than the tags as they give a detailed description of the dog, name of owner and clerk that issued the license, cost of the license, and they were commonly issued on a fancy certificate with the seal of the state or similar device denoting the licensing authority.
The first city to issue dog license tags on a continuing basis was Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1866.
As cities grew through population shift the need for dog control laws became more apparent and the licensing fee was refocused to defray the costs of dog control programs.
Some states experimented with a state ordinance and issued the same tag for the entire state; others issued by counties, but the majority of issuing agencies were, and continue to be, individual towns.
Surprisingly the states with the most pre-1900 issuing agencies were agricultural states. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas were not that populated in the 1800s yet they have an inordinate number of towns, small towns, selling and issuing dog license tags. The focus, as previously noted, was on using the licensing fee at that time to reimburse farmers for the loss of livestock as a result of marauding dogs.
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