Joshua Rothman profiles “dog runners”:
The market for dog runners, [Running Paws manager Joshua] Stine explained, is more specialized than the market for dog walkers. Running Paws has four kinds of customers. There are owners of aggressive or over-active dogs—dogs “who need some type of physical or mental release.” There are fitness enthusiasts: “people who, I guess, kind of, in a sense, project onto their dogs. They like the idea that their dog is jogging while they’re at work.” Show-dog owners hire Running Paws to keep their dogs in shape: “Some of them have given us a huge amount of credit for the muscle tone, the overall fitness of their dogs.”
And then there are people with overweight dogs. Getting a dog in shape, Stine said, can be surprisingly easy. “Dogs being animals, they bounce back far more quickly to an athletic state than a person.”
The Dish 