Saint Bernard dogs and their barrel collars

When I think of a Saint Bernard dog ("un san bernardo" in Spanish), I immediatelly put a little barrel under its neck in my mind. They seem to be inherently tied together in my subconscious.

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According to Wikipedia, Saint Bernard dogs never actually wore little barrels for any reason, and its instead a misportrayal that possibly stemmed from an artistic engraving of a dog of this breed.

St. Bernards are often portrayed (...) wearing small barrels of brandy around their necks. Avalanche victims supposedly drank the brandy to stay warm while awaiting rescue, although this is medically unsound. The monks of the St. Bernard Hospice deny that any St. Bernard has ever carried casks or small barrels around their necks; they attribute the image to an 1820 painting by Edwin Landseer, perhaps Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler (which became a popular engraving in 1831 by Charles Landseer).

However, regardless of the accuracy of the portrayal, I've always loved the story of dogs carrying a cask of brandy around their neck in order to warm people in the snow. When I was first stold this story, I struggled to imagine people trapped under an avalanche. The most similar thing in my mind was a building fallen due to a fire (I've never seen snow in real life). That's what I imagined. People trapped under a grey mass of snow and/or ashes, trembling from the cold, waiting to die from hypothermia, when they have the chance to be magically warmed up by a few gulps of brandy brought by a tracker dog in the rescue.

Now, as historically and medically unsound as that image may be, it wasn't until minutes ago, when I read the Wikipedia article, that I realised that it might not be true or accurate. I loved the image, and I still love it.

This was the picture of a Saint Bernard that I saw on Pixabay, which reminded me of the ones carrying barrels and the whole story.

It's an image worthy of appearing in literature: a race of oblivious rescuers trained to unknowingly carry a life-saving token around their necks. What does a dog feel or think when it is collared with such a package? Does it even think anything apart from "well it's heavy"? Does it simply forget about it?

I can't help but think of it as a touching scene near the ending of a tragic film.