Photo's description:

A very young member of the Irish Guards, pictured at Waterford Barracks with the regiment's mascot, an Irish Wolfhound. I thought that the dog must have moved, because on zooming in, there seemed to be a ghostly leg, and some obvious remedial work on his tail. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/limerick37/" target="_blank">James Guerin</a> explained this effect: "I think the 'ghost' is the original position of the dog's tail and maybe this was too 'between it's legs' for the owner. Seems a bit bizarre to edit it but maybe this was a 2nd version and the owner ended up going for the original print as the edit was too obvious. " Believe it or not, we now have a name for this dog. He was Leitrim Boy, out of Galtee Boy and Carlow Nora. Leitrim Boy was born on Tuesday, 12 November 1907, and so would have been 9 years old when this photo was taken (or 63 in dog years!). Thanks to <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnmcauley/" target="_blank">Niall McAuley</a> for providing us with this great link to <a href="http://www.thewolfhoundconnection.com/Mascots1.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Irish Guards' mascots</a> down through the centuries, including our lovely Leitrim Boy. As was pointed out below by a few people, the Irish Guards were on the Western Front in 1917, but as <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/33577523@N08/" target="_blank">ofarrl</a> said: "I think the most likely explanation for the presence of the Irish Guards, or at least the band members, in Waterford would have been for the purposes of recruitment, they did a similar tour of Ireland in April 1915." Date: Wednesday, 21 February 1917 NLI Ref.: <a href="http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/P_WP_2708" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">P_WP_2708</a>