These easygoing, affectionate, energetic dogs are family-friendly all-rounders, equally at home on the couch or in the field. Their name is misleading, though, as they don’t hail from Labrador but from Newfoundland where they worked as duck retrievers and fisherman’s mates, until English nobles brought the breed to the UK in the nineteenth century, and set about refining and standardizing it.
Some claim that yellow Labs are the laziest of the breed, while black Labs are the best hunters, but none of these claims are supported by science. Like people, each dog is different, and some breeders develop their stock for its skills in the field, while others are concerned more with conformation to the breed standard. However, none of these differences directly depend on the dog’s color.