Raising awareness and funding research to combat cancer in both dogs and humans, the eighth annual Puppy Up! Walk will be marching back to Guilford on Sunday, Oct. 13.

The Guilford Fairgrounds will host several hundred walkers—human walkers, accompanied by significantly more four-legged friends, according to the one of the event’s organizers, Barb Kenney.

The Puppy Up Foundation is a national nonprofit started in 2008 by a Texas man who walked 2,000 miles around the country with his two dogs, Hudson and Murphy, raising money and awareness for cancer research, according to the organization’s website www.puppyup.org. Chapters of Puppy Up exist all over the country.

The Connecticut shoreline walk was originally held at Hammonasset State Park, but is now in its fourth year at the Guilford Fairgrounds.

Cancer, with all the tragedy and anxiety it brings, can affect dogs as much as humans. Kenney said that when Puppy Up was founded, there was little understanding of how and why cancer affected dogs, or how it might be related to the disease in humans.

“The veterinarians were not educated,” she said, “but now...all this research has come out—that breast cancer in humans and breast cancer in dogs is basically the same. Then they found all these other lymphomas and all these other cancers are pretty common in both. They’ve come up with some pretty good research.”

Kenny said the shoreline Puppy Up! Walk has averaged about $35,000 in funds raised each year. These funds go to support various scientific studies or research centers across the country, including cutting edge work at the Animal Medical Center with Sloan Kettering and work at MIT in Boston.

It is also the only walk in the state, according to Kenney, which means dogs and humans from as far as Fairfield and New London will be gathering together in Guilford for the big event, which will include live music, food trucks, and a “pop-up shop,” with local pet businesses selling treats and toys.

“Dog people [are] a pretty tight group,” said Kenney.

Apart from funding scientific research, a large part of Puppy Up’s mission is simply to raise awareness, bringing more attention to the underfunded and underserved issue of canine cancer. Oncologists will attend the walk on Sunday, offering their professional experiences and detailing new avenues of research and treatment, according to Kenney.

“There’s a lot of really interesting stuff that has come up, and more and more is coming,” she said.

Seeking cures and understanding isn’t exclusively focused on dogs. Seeking cures or treatments by examining relationships and commonalities between human and canine cancers is a stated part of the Puppy Up mission.

Also, every year Puppy Up names two heroes—one dog and one human—who show “exemplary attitude towards their particular type of cancer,” according to the Puppy Up website.

This year’s examples embody the human-canine collaboration, Kenney said. Angelina Vignet adopted her dog, Freddie, and was initially annoyed by one somewhat strange behavior the dog exhibited.

“He kept poking at her breast with his nose,” said Kenney. “And she kept saying to the doctors, ‘There’s something wrong, I believe this dog knows there’s something wrong.’”

Vignet was eventually diagnosed with breast cancer, which was prevented from spreading. She credits Freddie with saving her life, according to Kenney.

Tragically, Freddie himself has now been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.

“Now, [Vignet is] doing everything she can to save the dog’s life,” Kenney said.

Relationships like these between dogs and humans are what make Puppyup such a special organization, said Kenney, and the work of finding cures for both human and canine cancers so important.

For more information, or to register for the Puppyup walk, visit puppyupwalk.org/shoreline.