The black and white picture looks like an English cocker to me. I thought the English cocker and American cocker were lumped together for a long time and only in the past 40/50 years were they separated.
My Odie had a long snout like an English cocker, but his papers said he was an American cocker.
Maybe Mark can shed some light on this.
I recognize the b/w photo as Red Brucie, who was whelped June 8, 1921, so 25 years before the actual split into two Cocker breeds was accepted by both the American Kennel Club and the Kennel Club (of the United Kingdom).
As I stated in an earlier post in the "bred to" thread, Red Brucie appears in pedigrees of many dogs now recognized as representing two distinct Cocker breeds.
Something that everyone ought to be aware of is that in the US the breeds are referred to as the Cocker Spaniel and the English Cocker Spaniel.
In almost all other countries of the world, the naming is reversed, that is to say the English Cocker Spaniel becomes the Cocker Spaniel and our Cocker Spaniel becomes the American Cocker Spaniel. The notable exception is, I believe, Canada where each breed name is prefixed with the country of "origin" (at least all of the Canadians with whom I have spoken don't leave the identity of a dog to chance. Is that correct Canadian members?)
Confusing? Well there have been some "goof-ups" at the AKC when accepting a Cocker brought in from overseas, especially when hunting enthusiasts have imported dogs.
The foreign registry called the dog a "Cocker Spaniel" so a "Cocker Spaniel" it remains. It was driving the ECSCA secretary batty trying to ferret out these errors, because when the hunters would breed two "field bred" Cockers together and they went to register the pups, the registration was refused. To the AKC they were mixed breeds.
Recently, blue roan ACS have made an appearance. This is very odd to me because the breeders of particolor ACS and the standard had tried to "purge" roaning and heavy ticking from the ACS gene pool, and quite successfully until the late 1990's when "all of a sudden" these very flashy blue roan ACS showed up on the scene.
Investigation of their pedigrees shows that they are descended from "field bred" or true hunting Cockers, which suggests to me that they are really the product of imported English Cockers, improperly named at registration here, and mixed with conformation (show) ACS stock.
Since it would be a mess to straighten out, the breeds are really so very closely related anyway, and what would be gained but dogs losing their registration status, I think everyone just wants to let it go and pretend there wasn't really a breaking of the rules, so to speak. But that's just MHO.:naughty:
Here's a link to the field Cocker site. I think that almost every picture is an "English" Cocker Spaniel but few of them really even resemble their "bench bred" brothers and sisters:
http://www.fieldcockers.com/photos/dogs.htm
There was an American Cocker who earned a Master Hunter title within the past decade bred from conformation lines, if I can find the name or other info, I'll come back with it later.
There is a certain amount of tension between the serious hunting crowd and those who show/exhibit in any of the other AKC sanctioned activities.
The hunters look down their noses at the bench champions as "Foo Foo" dogs and I have heard more than one owner of show quality ECS suggest that the field bred dogs are "ugly", drag down the breeds reputation and ought to be split off to a third cocker breed.
I don't agree with either of those attitudes. As I stated in the other thread, Langley, a conformation champion, made a very favorable impression on a hard-core field cocker breeder in that working test a few days ago.
