PORTLAND – Western Cemetery overlooks Portland Harbor in the city’s most exclusive neighborhood. But this lovely spot has plainly gone to the dogs.

Poodles and pointers, terriers and retrievers, mastiffs and Great Danes romp over grave sites chasing sticks and balls and each other. Rolls of plastic bags and a list of rules at the entrances remind owners of their responsibilities. On their way out, visitors can drop the bags in a garbage can that sits over the remains of Sally, whose worn marble headstone reveals she died in 1853 but no longer shows her surname.

Dog owners insist the previously neglected graveyard is better off – they’ve organized cleanup days, raised money for restoration and, they say, driven off unsavory elements with their activities.

But they fear they may be pushed out by people who believe the 170-year-old cemetery has been desecrated. A citizens’ committee is working on a master plan for Western Cemetery. Dogs are not the only item under study, but they are the most contentious.

In cities from California to New York and Alaska to Hawaii, dog owners are fighting for off-leash areas where their pets can run free. They’re organizing advocacy groups, putting up Web sites and packing public hearings. In San Francisco, disagreements about the threat of free-running dogs to native vegetation and a nesting area along the city’s coastal bluffs have prompted a lawsuit and call for a congressional investigation.

Such disputes are not new, but they’ve heated up in the last five years as more people compete for open space, according to Claudia Kawczynska, editor of the “The Bark,” a Berkeley, Calif., magazine that proudly proclaims its roots in “off-leash activism.”

“I think a cemetery is a wonderful place actually because it honors what has come before, and there’s no better way to honor what’s come before than with the joy that dogs give,” Kawczynska says. “I could think of nothing better than to be greeted at the beginning of the day [by a dog] smelling my remains, just being with me somehow.”

Located in a densely populated section of Portland, the cemetery has become an increasingly popular spot to run dogs off their leashes. Owners arrive each morning, coffee mugs and coiled leashes in hand.

A chain-link fence around the 22 acres keeps pets from running into traffic, and the grounds feel open – not spooky like some of the wooded areas in the city where dogs are also allowed off-leash.

But no matter how well-behaved the dogs or how happy they look, some people argue that dogs don’t belong in a cemetery – even when their owners use the plastic “Mutt Mitts” to pick up after them.

“Let’s put it this way: You could have a law that would say it’s OK if you stab people, as long as you pull the knife out and clean up the mess,” says Paul O’Neil, president of the local chapter of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal group. “As far as we’re concerned, the harm is already done.”

Western Cemetery was the city’s primary burial ground through the mid-19th century. Today, many of the white marble headstones lean or have fallen over. Some are broken. Others are illegible, worn down by the elements or covered in lichen.