Man’s best friends sometimes aren’t. BY D. CHRIS RISKER

pop culture to haute couture, our love affair with the dog has reached

new heights and shows no sign of abating,” reads the inside of the dust cover of Marjorie Garber’s book Dog Love.

The dog industry has created doggie walking services, doggie day care, and doggie health insurance. The August 6, 2006, Sunday Denver Post headline asked, “Denver Going to the Dogs?” because of the prevalence of doggie services in the Denver area. Garber goes on to observe: “The social integration of dog into human culture—and human into dog culture—is, we might say, at an all-time high.” But it has not always been so.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “The Character of Dogs” criticizes a sizable portion of Victorian society, which was very fond of dogs “but in their proper

Ti Wi seem to be living in dog days. From cyberspace to pet superstores,

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place.” Canines have insinuated themselves into our lives since Stevenson’s time; in fact, Stevenson regarded endearment as a canine’s principal job. He observed that “Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may lie outside.”

Could it have been the outside joys that the dogs of the Boston Marathon were seeking when they trotted and yapped their way into America’s most famous marathon? No longer supplicants in their masters’ courts, they mischievously scampered though the course and at the heels of the runners. They cut their bit of trouble at a time when they were free to roam—well before today’s doggie leash laws, which, according to Garber, a Harvard Bostonian herself, remain stridently controversial. Or perhaps it was the sight of runners in full flight that triggered the dogs’ ancient chase instincts. And if not the chase, then perhaps it was the call to find their place in the pack. Of course, runners know a thing or two about the nervous hierarchy of the pack. In any case, the dogs appeared and figured into book and newspaper accounts of the Boston Marathon.

The first was a feisty fox terrier in 1947 that made Yun Bok Suh fall hard to all fours at mile 19. The fall ripped his hand and tore open his knee. Binding his hand with his sweatband and letting the knee drip, he nevertheless flew to victory. In 1950 another Korean, Yun Chi Choi, also encountered a Boston Marathon canine when a red chow nipped at his heels. Yun managed to elude the chow and went on to finish third as the Koreans completed the first 1-2-3 sweep at Boston. The third encounter is best known, that of Johnny “The Younger” Kelley, who was shadowed by a black Labrador retriever in the 1961 race. The account in the New York Times featured a photo dubbed, “Everybody Gets Into the Act at Boston Marathon.” Kelley took yet another of his famous second places at Boston, but not until he had stumbled over the dog at the 17th mile of the race. Kelley’s fall was short because Fred Norris, a 39-year-old Englishman, helped him to his feet. The Times quoted Kelley after the race as saying, “Fred, I don’t know how to thank you. Did you get third? I’m very glad.”

The Labrador did not fair as well as Norris in the Times’s account, though other accounts, namely Michael Connelly’s in 26 Miles to Boston, go easy on the interloper. Connelly reports that Eino Oksanen, the Finnish winner, said, “laughingly, the dog should be shot.” The Times article suggests a different account and a different attitude toward the incident: “Somebody should have taken a gun and shot that dog to stop him from doing that thing to Kelley. The dog bothered Kelley and everyone else. I [Oksanen] almost fell on top of Kelley.” However, Tom Derderian’s Boston Marathon account asserts that “Kelley understood the dog and secretly liked that the dog liked staying with the leaders.” What is to be made of the different accounts?

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This is a marathon that has featured anumber of famous “takeouts,” not all of them by canines. Clarence DeMar socked two spectators in the heat of the 1941 Boston Marathon: one for throwing water and another for asking for his autograph on the course. As the Korean Kee Yong Ham was about to complete his victory in 1950, a student burst from the crowd to insert himself into the victory photo. It was a stunt for the student’s fraternity. He was swiftly taken out by Joe Smith, a spectator who won the race in 1942. Smith took him out hard enough to send = him seeking medical attention. And ‘A Jock Semple was fiercely protective of the in 1960, the B.A.A.’s Jock Semple, Boston Marathon, and he did not suffer fools—or seven years before his historic dogs—on his racecourse. Kathrine Switzer grab (to remove

her number) and shove, pummeled a clown—yes, literally a clown—to the ground with enough ferocity to attract a police officer’s attention. Jock was let off because of his status as a race official and the crowd’s empathy. Clearly, the sentiment of the time was that the race and its runners weren’t to be interfered with.

Garber, I believe, would point out the cultural anxiety revealed in the different accounts. She would highlight how we uneasily tack back and forth between Oksanen’s objective view and Derderian’s and Connelly’s more anthropomorphic views. She would cause us to wonder whether we are revealing more about the dog or about ourselves in these accounts.

Kelley’s experience anticipated Hal Higdon’s greatest fear of dogs while on training runs. Though he had been bitten, Higdon’s greatest fear was of being tripped, as he reveals in his classic book On the Run From Dogs and People: “What they

& Hal Higdon writes about classic canine encounters and other running problems in On the Run From Dogs and People.

[dog owners] don’t realize is that their supposedly playful dog could just as easily cause injury by tripping me.” The chapter title “Dog Food” says much about Higdon’s attitude toward dogs when he was on a training run. Higdon also tells of Curt Garfield of the Framingham News, who trained on the Boston course with two boxers, one fore and one aft, to ward off other dogs, leading one to suspect that the three well-known encounters noted here represent only a few of the possible Boston Marathon dog stories. Indeed, Derderian, in Boston Marathon, tells of a training run in the Boston area on which Bill Rodgers saved Alberto Salazar, called “the rookie” then, from a Great Dane. As the Dane glowered over the fallen Salazar, Rodgers threw his keys at the dog.

The threat of shooting a dog for any purpose today would likely call forth a different response than in Oksanen’s day. Garber writes of a New York City police officer who was fired for striking a dog that soiled the precinct floor. Another police officer in the same incident was fired for taking the same animal to the animal shelter. The police commissioner defended his harsh treatment of the men, who had initially denied the incident, by saying that he saw deceitfulness that might easily be used against the human public next.

And if you don’t believe that things have shifted, take note of this true account from Derderian’s Boston Marathon. The Ethiopian runner Tesfaye Tafa’s training run (in Ethiopia) was brought to a halt by a local dog. Tafa went home, picked up a gun, and ran back to the same spot. He shot and killed the dog then continued on his training run. Now how do you feel? (I have a wave of horror followed by a

Matthew J. Williams

sense of justice when I think of a boxer that attacked me at the end of a 20-miler. A compassionate motorist—yes, they exist—gave me shelter in the front seat of his car, or I would be competing today as a disabled athlete.)

Indeed, we are in a new wave of anthropomorphism, as Garber asserts. She argues that many of the doggie books being published today parallel the self-help books of humans. She illustrates her point by noting that Clarissa Estes’s bestselling Women Who Run With the Wolves was emulated by Barbara Graham’s “sardonic send-up” Women Who Run With the Poodles. Graham’s book has a section called “Reclaiming Your Sacred Inner Bitch.” What runners can’t get in touch with their “sacred inner bitch’”? I think of such moments as the water cup’s being too full or not full enough, or someone stepping on my heel. Or my worst moment, when I was running the Utica Boilermaker on too few training miles, and I realized from the response of the crowd that a runner dressed as SpongeBob was on my left shoulder! Wasn’t the fact that I was running badly bad enough? But I was having trouble dropping SpongeBob.

The dogs of the Boston Marathon were casual strays, not the bandanna-clad, Frisbee-catching dogs of today. They made hazardous a course that was maintained strictly for the runners of the Boston Marathon, a race for those devoted few, who in Derderian’s words, “tried and tried again.” Mp