Before Chaser, the Border Collie who knew hundreds of objects by name in the 2010s, there was Tuffy, the Hollywood dog who stunned John Hopkins University scholars by correctly identifying and retrieving around fifty unique objects in the 1930s.

As a puppy, Tuffy was given to Gerhardt Orvedahl, South Dakota cowboy, while he recovered from a riding accident. Needing company and distraction, Orvedahl began training the pup to retriever and know objects by name, from coins to potatoes. An Australian Shepherd mixed with either Border Collie or Rough Collie, Tuffy was a born working dog and cowhand, fitting in effortlessly to ranch life while learning more and more, including the skill of leading horses by rein and very long stays over the years at home from 1930 to 1935.

When Orvedahl imagined more and took Tuffy to Hollywood, it wasn’t long before the handsome dog with one ice-blue eye drew attention from a Paramount producer. Tuffy landed his first cameo role before the end of 1935 in Nevada. In 1936 he gained small parts in more western dramas like Drift Fence while his reputation grew so that before the year was out Tuffy would appear in six films, most notably The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, his only Technicolor production, which originally had no part for a dog at all, but one was written in especially for Tuffy.

He went on to act until Brigham Young in 1940, in which he is only seen in a glimpse, before an illness halted his movie career. He died in 1946 at age sixteen.

✯ Known Tuffy Filmography ✯

Nevada (1935)

Drift Fence (1936)

Early to Bed (1936)

The Moon’s Our Home (1936)

Old Hutch (1936)

Rose of the Rancho (1936)

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

The Mighty Treve (1937)

Hawk of the Wilderness (1938) a serial

Phantom Gold (1938)

Pioneer Trail (1938)

Rolling Caravans (1938)

Stagecoach Days (1938)

Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) a serial

Brigham Young (1940)

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During the rise of canine performers like Luke, Teddy, and Strongheart in silent-era Hollywood, Jack Hoxie was a noted rodeo-cowboy-turned-actor in westerns, gaining his first feature-film credit in 1919 after many shorts. In 1923 Hoxie sent away to Australia for a pregnant Australian Shepherd with the goal of raising the pups to be performing dogs. Only one survived in the litter: Bunk.

Bunk, a stocky, rather short-legged blue merle, was Hoxie’s dog from the start, making their partnership as a screen cowboy and his dog naturally convincing. For all the specialty performance skills, Hoxie hired Bert de Marc as Bunk’s personal trainer.

Through his career, which launched in 1924 when Bunk was still a juvenile, he tracked down bad guys, wrangled livestock, and served as a cowboy’s best friend in a score of westerns with Hoxie. Bunk became renowned enough that he even appeared in movies without Hoxie, such as Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come in 1928. He performed into the early 1930s and lived to eighteen years old.

There is an excellent article about Bunk on the website Herding on the Web.

It’s hard to trace all Bunk films since most are lost and his publicity was misleading. Jack Hoxie claimed that Bunk was in most of his (Hoxie’s) feature films, but even if you watch those that survive, Bunk is seldom in evidence. In at least one film (Gold), he was featured in publicity, but only one dog in the distance, who may or may not be Bunk, is ever seen.

Here is his filmography to the best of our knowledge, nearly all of which are lost. The dog in his supposed final film, Law and the Lawless (1932), is tricolored, maybe Bunk’s son, which was not uncommon for canine actors in Hollywood at the time.

Ridgeway of Montana (1924) (first film, for which he received much publicity)

Fighting Fury (1924)

Hidden Loot (1925) 

The White Outlaw (1925) (one of Bunk’s only surviving films)

The Demon (1926)

The Fighting Peacemaker (1926)

The Wild Horse Stampede (1926) (surviving only in a film archive in Moscow)

Red Hot Leather (1926)

The Fighting Three (1927)

Grinning Guns (1927)

Heroes of the Wild (1927) (possibly Bunk, billed as “Tornado”)

The Rambling Ranger (1927)

Rough and Ready (1927)

The Western Whirlwind (1927)

Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1928)

Shepherd of the Hills (1928)

Gold (1932) (surviving, but does not appear to show Bunk at all—see notes)

Law and Lawless (1932) (surviving with a different dog, unless Bunk was dyed for the part or the lighting made his coat look black instead of merle)

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