These two photos are of a dog spying a flask during Prohibition. These were taken at the Potomac River and are dated to February 23, 1922. The dog was actually trained to find hidden stores of liquor. (An early sniffer dog).
The dog looks a lot like a golden retriever, even though I’m a bit skeptical that it was one. There were almost none of them in the US at the time.
Retrieving dogs are a commonly used as sniffer dogs. All they have to do is associate the scent of what they are retrieving with the substance in question and then build upon that.
Interesting! Definitely looks a lot like a golden, but hard to tell without seeing coloration how far off the resemblance is. The face seems like it has some German Shepherd qualities in the first photo, maybe? *wags* – Gilligan from WagsAhoy.com
This is what a quality golden retriever looked like in the 1920’s: https://retrieverman.net/2011/06/11/ch-haulstone-dan-192/
It looked to me like the dog had a black muzzle, but then in the second photo, it’s just the shadow.
Wow, beautiful! Interesting to see how the common style from the 1920’s differs from today in terms of build and coat, etc.
My guess would be largely the old-fashioned farm collie, with a touch of setter or spaniel. As to color, the legs show what could be tan markings with darker (blck? Brown?) body color, and white front paws. And yes, could be darker shadings on the face.
I have seen dogs sired by a farm collie out of a Golden bitch, that could have been brothers to the dog pictured.
While the AKC didn’t register any Goldens until 1925, there were a scattered few in the US and in Canada before that. So. . .anything is possible.
As to scent work. . . Dogs have been used to detect things as various as illegal drugs, counterfeit CDs, explosives, arson accelerants, firearms, cadavers, (including buried and underwater) and much more. Even the presence of several sorts of cancer, variations in diabetics’ blood levels, impending seizures in epileptics.
I have witnessed a dog following the track of a human made not days but weeks earlier. A good tracking dog can discriminate between fresh tracks only an hour or two different in age, as well as between individual people. Fascinating.
The dog in the photo looks a lot like a golden retriever at a glance, but a closer look shows a dog that, to me, looks like the collies that my family has had for longer than I can remember. The shape of the head, especially, looks collie-ish. Not a rough collie but an old-fashioned collie.