Small Dog, Big Honor

Size doesn’t matter.

Consider Duke, a 12-year-old Welsh corgi. The brown, white and black pooch weighs a paltry 27 pounds and is built like an oversized football with legs.

But on Tuesday, Duke was the dog of the hour, earning the highest honor from the Los Angeles chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: the Hero Dog of the Year award.

Duke tugged his 85-year-old owner, Jack Lustman, a retired military officer, out of the path of an oncoming truck that was barreling toward him on the wrong side of the street.

“If it wasn’t for Duke, I wouldn’t be here,” said a grateful Lustman at an SPCA news conference where the dog was given a plaque, a year’s supply of dog food and a bag of doggy treats.

Lustman said he was taking his regular morning walk through his Cathedral City neighborhood last October. Because of road construction along the usual route, he decided to cross the street in the middle of the block. But as he stepped off the curb, Duke barked and pulled at the leash, yanking Lustman back onto the sidewalk just as the wrong-way truck sped past, missing Lustman by inches.

“He barked like mad . . . I couldn’t move another step because of him,” Lustman said. “If he didn’t pull me back I would have been gone.”

A thankful Lustman said he rewarded Duke with a peck on the snout and a special meal of eggs and liver. “I kissed him and said ‘Thank you, Duke.’ ”

The little dog’s heroism was witnessed by several neighbors who verified the story for SPCA officials.

Eight years ago, Lustman said, his wife, Janet, fell into their backyard pool and became tangled in the pool cover. Duke saw it and ran barking to Lustman, who pulled his wife from the pool.

“He is just a very protective dog,” Janet Lustman said.

Maybe too protective. Just before the news conference, Duke sat between the Lustmans in the SPCA’s offices, growling and baring his teeth at anyone who dared come within two feet of the couple. Even SPCA officials kept their distance.

“He is an unusually intelligent dog,” Janet Lustman said. “But he is not very sociable.”

Duke, who was named after actor John Wayne, joins an honor roll that includes a white Samoyed who jumped on her master to protect her from a falling oak wall unit during the Northridge earthquake and an Australian shepherd who discovered an injured woman who had been thrown from a horse and was slowly suffocating in the mud.

“We try to honor dogs that have no training or special skills,” said Madeline Bernstein, Los Angeles SPCA president. “You may have one of these dogs for 12 years and you don’t know they can do anything until suddenly they save your life.”