Dr. Leonor Feliciano lived in the Philippines for three decades and never once dined on a dog.
But some people have hounded her about eating dogs because members of a Filipino tribe, called the Igorots, ate an occasional dog during the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. And no one has ever forgotten.
It's getting harder to forget with recent publicity about a new World's Fair exhibit, with maps and memorabilia, at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park. It has a section on the Philippines display, the fair's largest, which had 1,200 Filipinos from 40 tribes, one of which ate dogs.
The Filipinos at the fair lived on 47 acres, for all to see, like specimens in a scientific experiment. Some lived in huts, walked barefoot on dirt, wore loincloths and roasted meat on open fires. Sometimes the meat was a mutt.
That image - a media favorite - has thrown the culture's reputation in the doghouse, some of the metropolitan area's 10,000 Filipinos say.
Feliciano, 52, is a physician, mother of four in Creve Coeur and president of the Philippine Arts Foundation, a local nonprofit group. She worked with the museum for 18 months on reconstructing the Philippines exhibit. She chastises the media for focusing on the urban legend of how Dogtown got its name.
That story goes like this: Dogtown was the site of the Philippines exhibit. Members of the Filipino Igorot tribe lived there, stole neighborhood dogs and roasted them for feasting.
No one stole the dogs, Feliciano says - the city's pound supplied them. And the exhibit was northwest of Dogtown, near Wydown Middle School.
She suggests that instead of mentioning the dog chowing, the media should focus on other facts from the Philippines exhibit, such as the Filipino soldiers who won the fair's top music award in a band contest.
Or focus on the world's largest collection of seashells from the shores of the Philippines, or on models of the ornate Manila Cathedral, or the stone wall that used to surround cities to keep intruders out, or on statues of patron saints, dressed in hand-embroidered, gold-threaded garb.
Alderman Joe Roddy, whose ward includes Dogtown, wants to learn about these things. He only knows about the alleged origins of Dogtown's name.
"The story has been circulating for generations," he says.
Some local historians say Dogtown actually got its name because steel and clay workers who lived in the area, before the fair, kept dogs to protect their families.
Last week, Feliciano talked with other Filipino leaders about how to heel the canine connection.
One of the things they've concluded is that the public needs education about Filipino culture. So Feliciano wants to explain why some members of the Igorot tribe included dogs in their diets:
The Igorot tribe lived in the mountains of the northern Philippines on steep ridges, so steep that cows couldn't climb them. They ate rice from plants that thrived from nearby waterfalls.
Dogs, though not numerous, were small enough to climb the ridges and, therefore, to be eaten as a treat.
"People are mortified by anything different," she said. "We eat cows, the French eat locusts, and some tribes eat dogs."
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