A childhood belief about cats and dogs

When I was little our family dog was an English Sheepdog. English Sheepdogs have no tails. I asked my dad why our dog didn't have a tail. My father went into a long explanation about shepherds not wanting to be taxed for their working dogs that he explained to me again when I was older. The tax collectors would use the tails to tell where the dogs were in the flock of sheep, so the shepherds cut off the dog's tails so the tax collectors wouldn't know how many working dogs they had.

All I got out of the explanation at age 5 is Dad didn't want to pay taxes so we cut the dog's tail off. I thought my father was pretty cheap and wished he had paid to keep the tail.