About
A Hound's Guide lists places in Australia you can take a dog, and it shows its working. Every entry names the source the rule came from and the date somebody read it.
Most writing about taking a dog somewhere is either a list with no rules in it, or a council policy document that is accurate and unreadable. This guide sits between the two.
Every entry answers the questions you actually have at the gate. Are dogs allowed. On lead or off. At what times, in which months, and on which part of the sand. Who decides, and where you can read that for yourself. It is written for the person standing in a car park at eight in the morning with a dog in the boot, working out whether it is safe to unclip the lead.
The name is a nod to a rather more ambitious guide, the one that covers the entire galaxy. The joke stops there. Nobody wants a punchline while they are trying to find out whether the beach is closed to dogs until April.
How an entry gets in
Nothing here is written from memory or copied off another list. Each entry is built the same way, in the same order, and it carries the evidence with it.
A council page or dog management policy, a national park page, a state tourism body, or the venue's own site. Those four, and nothing softer.
A council's dog policy names specific beaches, specific reserves and specific hours. The friendly page about it usually does not.
Every entry lists its sources and the date they were read, so you can check the same pages we did, or see at a glance that it is getting old.
A place with no findable dog policy is a guess, and a guess about whether your dog is welcome is worse than a shorter guide.
Open any entry and scroll to the bottom. The sources sit there as links, next to the date the entry was last verified. If one of those links has moved or the rule has changed, that is worth telling us about.
How well sourced
A lot of what is useful about travelling with a dog is not written down anywhere official. A track that allows dogs might be confirmed by the council in one sentence, or it might rest on one person in a forum saying they took theirs and nobody stopped them. Both are worth knowing. They are not worth the same.
So every entry carries a rating that says which kind it is. It is worked out from the sources on the page, not typed in by hand, which means the only way to raise it is to find a better source or fill the record in.
The dog rules come from the land manager or the venue, and we have checked them recently.
Confirmed from a good source, though some details are still thin.
Backed by secondary reporting rather than by the land manager. Check before you go.
Reported by people who have been, but not confirmed by anyone official.
It is not a quality score. A community reported beach can be the best one in the state. It is a statement about the evidence, not about the place, and a low rating is an honest admission rather than a warning.
If you have been somewhere and we have it wrong, every entry has a Suggest an edit button, and a link to whatever contradicts us is the thing that gets it fixed fastest.
The part nobody publishes
Building the first set of entries meant looking at far more places than went in. Where a dog policy could not be confirmed from a public source, the place was dropped rather than guessed at, however good it looked.
One of them was a botanic garden that turned out to ban dogs entirely, which is exactly the sort of thing a list assembled from photographs would have got wrong.
That is the trade the guide makes. It is short, and what is in it holds up.
Before you travel
Australian national parks very often ban dogs outright, including on the roads and in the car parks. State forests, council reserves and regional parks very often allow them. Two patches of bush on the same ridge can have opposite rules and look identical from the gate.
This is the single most common way people get caught out. Check who manages the land, not what the scenery looks like.
Seasonal beach rules move the most. Off lead all day in winter, on lead or banned outright over summer, and the dates are set council by council rather than nationally. Trial closures and nesting season closures appear at short notice.
An entry here tells you what the rule was on the day it was checked. Confirm it with the land manager or the venue before you travel.
Send it through with a link to the page that states the dog rules, and it goes into the queue to be checked.
Explore
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Try a suburb, a dog's name for a place, or something like "beach" or "brewery".
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The guide is small so far. If you know somewhere it is missing, tell us about it.