Canis lupus hominis

This is the Dobermann Pinscher from W.E. Mason’s Dogs of All Nations (1915).

This dog is quite different from the svelte creatures with elegant show crops that we know today.

One can easily see its Beauceron, German Shepherd, and Rottweiler features. In fact, those features seem to come through on this dog more than those from the standard pinscher, which is another ancestor of the breed.

Classifying the dobermann is actually not an easy task.

I would stick my neck out and put it with the herding breeds, simply because German shepherd and Beauceron are thought to be the primary influences on the breed.

However, we actually don’t know exactly what proportions of which breeds actually made up the dobermann.

Traditionally, it is put with the pinschers and schnauzers, which are kind of like the feists and curs for the German-speaking countries.

These dogs have been standardized into breeds, but for most of their history, they were the dogs of small farmers, who used them to control vermin and do some modest herding work. They shared this job with various dogs we call spitzes.

I am certain that the proto-standard pinscher played a role in developing some of the cur and feist strains that we have in the United States. I don’t know how this couldn’t have happened. Large numbers of Germans settled on the frontier. In my area,  the main cur type is what is called a mountain cur, which I’ve often thought resembles the Austrian pinscher.

However, the dobermann does not fit that same niche. It is true that the standard pinscher is an ancestor of the dobermann. However, when the tax collector named Ludwig Dobermann put together his breed, he really wasn’t producing a dog for small farmers to use as a multipurpose work animal.

He was creating a protection dog– a dog that someone with money could keep to protect his property.

Dobermann was a tax collector. A tax collectors in Imperial Germany were part of a larger civil servant class that had always characterized German society. In the centuries before the German Empire was founded in 1871, the German-speaking world was a series of smaller kingdoms and principalities. Many of these entities were landlocked or had no access to the major rivers (like the Elbe or the Rhine).  In order to trade with the outside world, these entities developed a large, literate professional class that could interface with those principalities and kingdoms that did have access. As a result, the German-speaking countries had a large professional class of civil servants– and the most literate people in the world.

When the German Empire was created following the Franco-Prussian War, this professional class continued to exist to administer this very diverse empire. The kingdoms and principalities did not disappear entirely. The were part of the empire, and to streamline everything, this professional class was needed just as much as it was before.

These civil servants did make fairly decent wages, and they had disposable income to buy large dogs. Because Dobermann was a tax collector, he needed a dog to protect himself.

So that’s how it got started.

But because of the dobermann’s utility and origin, I have a very hard time placing them within these groups we use to organize domestic dogs.

Maybe we should do to the dobermann what the FCI did to the dachshund. The FCI gave it its own grouping, simply because it is hard to place.

It’s not harder to place than the Dobermann.

Maybe we need a category called Imperial German Civil Servant Protection Dog.

Dogs in that category: the Dobermann.

But until then, I’m putting them with the herding dogs.

They just don’t seem to fit with the other pinschers.

And I’m even less comfortable calling them Molossers.

I do know they aren’t retrievers.

I think we can all agree on that.