GALUPO: The dog days are here again

If I knew anything about Chinese astrology, I’d swear this was the year of the dog.

“Hollywood has gone to the dogs,” says CBS spokeswoman Colleen Sullivan, laughing. “How many times have I heard that before?”

Only this time, it’s quite literally true.

Miss Sullivan is flush with high hopes for the network’s latest reality show, “Greatest American Dog.” Hosted by the zoologist and frequent television personality Jarod Miller, the show tests dog owners’ ability to train their dogs for a variety of challenges.

It garnered 9.4 million viewers with its premiere last week, and Miss Sullivan sees steadily building, “Survivor”-like potential for the show.

Over on the cable channel We-tv (Women’s Entertainment), one can find “Adventures in Doggie Daycare,” “America’s Cutest Puppies” and even, for those with a perhaps excessive reservoir of sentimentality, “Puppy Weddings.”

Last year, Animal Planet, another cable channel, picked up the popular United Kingdom series “It’s Me or the Dog,” starring dog trainer Victoria Stilwell, lately of “Greatest American Dog’s” panel of judges.

The big screen is about to start barking, too.

Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox are planning a Christmas Day release for “Marley & Me,” starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in an adaptation of former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan’s family memoir of the same name. (Marley is the incorrigibly naughty and, of course, irresistible yellow labrador who’s there through thick and thin.)

Slated for January is “Hotel for Dogs,” a DreamWorks Pictures production about a pair of siblings who secretly shelter stray dogs in a vacant house. (It’s based on a 1971 novel for young adults by Lois Duncan.)

Is this one of those - here the cliche is, for once, unavoidable - dog-bites-man stories? A news item that isn’t particularly newsworthy?

It’s not like our entertainment culture didn’t already claim adorable icons named Lassie, Scooby and Benji, right?

One possibility, says Mark R. Levin, a syndicated radio talk-show host, is that the nature of today’s media, with its wall-to-wall coverage, is making an age-old love affair between dogs and people seem newly intense.

“Human love for dogs has been around for as long as humans and dogs have been around,” he says.

More likely is that TV programmers and movie developers noticed that books about dogs have been flying off shelves - and responded accordingly.

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