Arizona republican., 1905-07-28
They May Look Alike and Still not
 be Equally Ef1caciOus.

The present Phoenix dog catcher is hard man to fool, as one of his con- stituents learned yesterday. The con- stituent is a moIorman on a street car.
 He had a dog by which he set a great
 deal of store and went to the expense
 of adorning him with a new gaudy
 collar to which he attached a round piece of brass. With him brass is
 brass and nothing more. The price of the brass dispensed by the city asses
 sor and tax gatherer is eXorbitant, far
 beyond the market and intrinsic value.
 The assessor charges as much for brass as gold is worth in the open market. The piece of brass one can buy there for $2 will not weigh half as much as a S5 gold piece. The mot
 orman declined to be robbed but he went to a store where brass Is sold at live and let live prices, bought as much as he needed for a few cents and fashioned his own dog tag on the
 same general lines as those issued by
 the assessor and tax collector.
 The design of the official tag is ex- 1 ceedingly simple. It is mere disk | three quarters of an inch in diameter with a little projection on the rim through which a little hole has been bored for convenience in attaching it to the dog. The motormans' dog tag would seem to have been hard to dis tinguish from the regularly authorized dog tax, especially at a casual glance
 such as the dog catcher fs supposed to
 bestow in his mad flight after un-
 tagged dogs. But there was some
 thing about this dog that attracted his
 unusual attention. Perhaps it was
 the ostentatiousness of the collar. At
 any rate he caught the dog and exam
 ned the tag. He found that instead of
 bearing the name of the city of Phoe- nix and an official number it bore only the name of some one, presumably the
 owner of the dog. The dog and tag were taken before the assessor. who, having been shown that he had an
 unknown rival in the dog tag trade,
 the dog was taken away and summar- fly put to death.
 It is customary to allow dogs a lease of life of one day in order that they may be redeemed by careless or thOughtless owners, but Tn this case the dog catcher was irritated. Here was not thOughtIessness but an ap- parent studied disregard of the ordi- nance with reference to dogs.
 Within two or three hours after the capture of the dog the owner called al the ClIy nall To see about him. The subject of the competition he had es- tablished in the dog tag business was brought up. He said that he had not attempted to forge a tag; that when he made that tag he did not intend it to be in any way official but that he was not ready just then to buy brass at the fancy prices at which the as SeSSOr was holding it. He had put the disk on his dog with his own name on it not as a measure of pro- lection for the dog but as a means of Identification. He supposed that when, if ever, the dog was caught with that spurious tag on him. the dog catcher would see the name and give him chance for redemption.
 When he was told that the dog was dead he grew excited and in the heat of the moment he threatened to knock the dog catcher off his wagon at the first sight of him. That was not an threat. Any owner of a dog to which he has become attached can | readily understand how the motorman l felt about it.