It’s official. Bend is the top dog, according to Dog Fancy magazine, the dog-friendliest city in the country. I don’t doubt that, nor do I doubt that love of dogs extends past the city limits across Central Oregon.

All this love of dogs can be a decidedly mixed blessing, however, and both sides of the story are pretty easy to find:

Bend is a community loaded with dog parks, one of the things that won it attention from Dog Fancy. That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when dog lovers bedeviled the Bend City Council with requests to create that first special area where dogs can run unleashed.

At the same time, unfortunately, Bend is a community where folks assume dogs are welcome absolutely everywhere, no matter what those pesky signs might say. Thus, though it’s illegal to have anything but a service animal in the grocery store, I frequently see small furry faces peeking out from under owners’ arms at my neighborhood supermarket — and downtown, there are still people who believe those “no dogs allowed” signs at street festivals surely don’t apply to their furry friends.

Then there’s a problem that’s not limited to Bend and that, at first glance, may not seem like a problem at all. That’s the sale of prescription pet medications online and perhaps at other stores.

First, understand that it’s not all about the money. Yes, some veterinarians make a nice profit from prescription medications, though that isn’t always the case. At Deschutes Veterinary Clinic in Bend, for example — where I take my animals — prescription drugs are sold at cost, according to Dr. Scott Kramer.

Instead there’s another problem, one that’s borne out by the folks at the Oregon Veterinary Examining Board and by successful actions against one Internet company in Florida and Texas. In both cases, 1-800-PetMeds, without admitting guilt, paid substantial fines for illegal sales of prescription medications. Also in both cases, it was state boards of pharmacy, not a veterinarians group, that took action against the site.

Here’s why. Prescription medications are, by law, supposed to be sold only to patients whose doctors and veterinarians have actually seen them, whether they’re human or canine. Clearly, an online pharmacy or other store has no way of assuring that.

From a consumer’s standpoint there’s a bigger problem, however, and it’s not just limited to the Internet. Prescription drugs are sold by manufacturers — not middlemen — to pharmacies, physicians and veterinarians. That assures that what you buy is what has been prescribed, that it has been handled properly and remains fresh and effective.

Yet there’s a thriving black market in pet medications, and, Deschutes’ Kramer says, veterinarians are routinely approached by distributors who ask them to purchase prescription medications in bulk from manufacturers and sell them to the distributors. Presumably, the latter turn around and sell the drugs to outlets that could not buy them legally on their own.

You may wonder, as I did, what’s so bad about that. It might be all right if there were some way to assure that distributors and those purchasing from them sold only the real thing and took care of it properly. There isn’t, however, and both Kramer and state Veterinary Examining Board officials say it’s a real problem when dogs receive outdated drugs of dubious strength or drugs that are not what the labels say they are.

I don’t think anyone would seriously consider buying black market antibiotics for a sick kid. Yet when we purchase pet medications from online stores, we may be doing just that for our dogs. We have no way of knowing. And that, says Kramer, is the real problem. We think we’re doing the right thing and saving a few bucks in the process. We may not be, however, and it’s our dogs — or cats — that suffer from our penny pinching.