PORTLAND, Ore.  Star stopped to scratch herself beside the carrot ginger soup.

“Look at her; she’s the calmest dog you’ve ever met, isn’t she?” Lawrence Sax said of Star, his 8-year-old Australian shepherd mix, as he held her leash at a Whole Foods Market here. “Everybody I know loves her.”

Mr. Sax had apparently overlooked the glare of Stefan Koprinkov.

“I love animals,” Mr. Koprinkov, who had to step around the dog in his search for cheese pizza, said later. “But it’s wrong for animals to be in the store.”

Mr. Koprinkov is not the only person who thinks so. In the last year, the food safety division of the Oregon Agriculture Department has received more than 600 complaints about animals in food stores, and a disproportionate number of them have come from the Pearl District of Portland, an affluent, dog-passionate procession of newer condominiums and shiny retail shops at the edge of downtown. Whole Foods has had complaints; the Safeway a few blocks away has had even more.

“Usually they’ll hold off and not make a complaint until they’ve seen a dog urinate in the grocery store or jump up and try to swipe a pack of meat,” said Vance Bybee, the head of the food safety division. “Or they’ve seen dogs pooping in the aisle, that sort of thing.”