"Teek" a four year old pit bull and his master, Autumn Morrison, Coquille, 2, are ready to show off their native costumes in the Dawg Days of Summer Pet and People parade in North Bend on Saturday. World Photo by Madeline Steege

The scene late Saturday morning at Florida Square in North Bend was that of a small-town parade waiting to begin: a log truck with two billboards hung from the logs on its trailer, a group of North Bend High School cheerleaders clad in brown and gold uniforms, a group of men clad in moccasins and frontiersman's outfits chatting, laughing, occasionally firing rifle blanks into the air.

But among the dozens of people gathering at the parched grass patch before the July Jubilee parade were other visitors, four-legged ones. Many of the dogs were adorned more like humans - occasionally, dressed like their owners.

A woman with wavy, frosty blond hair arrived at Florida Square, pushing a two-place baby carriage festooned with fabric roses.

Linda Clem's own costume, a red-and-blue dress and vest in the old Scandinavian style, was festive enough. But the reason for the Marshfield High School teacher's presence at the parade was inside the carriage: two Shih Tzus, bundles of caramel-color hair almost concealing the small eyes and panting tongues underneath. Topping each dog's head was a tiny straw cap - matching an equally tiny hat perched incongruously on their owner's head, around a topknot.

"This one is called Sir Carman Lovealot," Clem said, pointing to the dog waving his tail at the front of the stroller. "And the other is Sir Elvis Lovealot," she said of the shy animal curled into the carriage's back seat.

On the square a few feet away was a folding table with sign-in sheets of dog owners, bird owners, even owners of stuffed animals. The names of 40 owners were penciled onto the papers, owners of the Queensland heeler draped with bluish foil and costumed as a dragon, of the pit bull draped in war paint and feathers and tricked out as a war horse. Beside the sign-in sheets was a cardboard box filled with a few chunky myrtlewood pucks hung from ribbons: the medals to be awarded to the most inventively arrayed four-footers in the parade.

Parked on the curb of the grassy square was a sport-utility vehicle and, behind it, a trailer remade into a parade float, groaning with stuffed dolls in the form of Dalmatians and sheepdogs. Twenty minutes before the parade was to begin at noon, several adults and children chatted gaily, most in black-spotted T-shirts like a Dalmatian's fur - and one woman covered head to toe in a brown, floppy-eared dog suit.

"I just got married a week ago," a laughing Kelly Fletcher said, her freckled face just showing through the felt outfit, "and this is my honeymoon!"

But despite the comical appearance of the float and the relaxed conversation, the builders of the display had arranged the event with a serious purpose: to win support for building a new animal shelter to replace Coos County's only shelter, a facility they called crumbling and outmoded.

After several attempts to move the shelter to private management failed since the mid-1970s, pet-welfare advocates made another effort in 2000 by forming the Pacific Coast Humane Society. But its members soon judged the existing animal shelter not to be worth saving, said Linda Newman, a board member for the society.

"We looked at it but because of its age and deterioration, we decided the money was better spent on a new facility," Newman said minutes before the parade.

But with a replacement shelter estimated to cost between $500,000 and $750,000, the humane society needed a way to alert would-be donors to the county's problem with dog and cat overpopulation. Last year, members concocted a combination pet contest and parade, combining lighthearted fun with animals with a chance to distribute brochures asking residents' support for pet welfare. To drum up more interest for the second-annual event, the society elected to merge it with North Bend's July Jubilee parade, a centerpiece of the city's 101st-anniversary celebration.

Far beyond being a dog or cat's home of last resort, the future shelter is planned to be the hub of an education effort to solve the overpopulation problem culturally, said John Fletcher, the humane society's project manager.

"The emphasis will be on education," he said, "on being a resource to the young and elderly on pet population, animal care and safety. We have a systemic culture of dysfunction here; while animal care standards have evolved elsewhere in the last 20 years, there hasn't been much change here."

" Let's do it!" John Fletcher called out, seven minutes after noon. Behind him, along the curb of Union Avenue, five North Bend Fire engines slowly budged, ready to lead the July Jubilee parade's path through downtown streets.

Some of the costumed dogs trotted, their owners holding them by the leash, ahead or behind the Dalmatian-themed parade float; a parade organizer would walk among the animals, occasionally spotting an owner and passing him or her a medal.

A few dozen yards down the street, the first of a few hundred spectators appeared along the parade route: three boys sitting on the curb outside the public library. Retha Clark, one of the riders on the float, reached down to a pile of glassy bead necklaces and flung a handful of them toward the children.

To the right was an old man who gave a friendly wave to the humane society's float while holding the leash on his Dalmatian with the other. A teenage boy skipped off the float and handed the spectator a yellow brochure, the first from a sheaf of hundreds in his arm - invitations to donate money to the humane society and its future shelter.

South to Virginia Avenue, a block to Sherman and back toward Florida Square, the twos among the spectators became fives, the fives dozens. A bearded man speared a necklace with his hand, the cigarette barely wiggling between his lips. Three enthusiastic middle-age women greeted the procession loudly, one banging wooden sticks together and her companions whistling and yelling. Even a pair of hard-faced men with their hair in do-rags volunteered a nod and a wave. All the while the float's passengers delivered their souvenirs, firing beads for fun and passing out brochures for education.

As the parade headed north, back to its starting point, the audience thinned and more gunshots from the "frontiersmen" signaled the end of the procession. The SUV towing the dog float pulled gently to a stop and its crew started taking down the displays, carrying off the stuffed animals and necklaces.

John Fletcher, turning to the sign-in table, scanned the list again. A dozen of the pet owners had received medals, including Linda Clem, the woman in the tiny straw hat, who was judged the most identically dressed to her dogs.

Sky Blaney looked on, her dog Teek hovering by her side - and still sporting feathers and war paint.

"And the best costume goes to... Teek!" Fletcher said. The slight, brown-haired woman smiled shyly and took one of the myrtlewood medals from him.

Funded mostly through registration fees, the Dawg Days of Summer was likely to garner a few hundred dollars for the Pacific Cove Humane Society, which Fletcher readily agreed was a molecule in the group's fund-raising bucket. But he concluded the society's presence in the heart of North Bend, in front of an audience would pay off in the long run.

"Normally you're preaching to the choir," he said. "Here, we're in front of John Q. Public, who we normally don't reach.

"This is the event you throw to attract attention to the cause. This is not about money but about getting in front of people so they know who you are."