PALO ALTO, Calif. - s4story -- Roch Dog, the standards and certification body for dog friendly hotels, has published Weighed and Found Wanting: Canine Weight Limits at Hotels, the first study of the weight limits hotels set for dogs and of the reasons they give for them.

Roughly two hotels in five cap the dogs they accept by weight, and the typical limit is about 20 kilograms, or 44 pounds, below the weight of every adult Labrador and golden retriever. About half of American hotels set a limit, against one in five in Britain and none of the German or Austrian hotels Roch Dog ranks. The limit is rarely a brand rule: outside a handful of brands, it is chosen hotel by hotel.

The study took each reason hotels give to the research. No study has measured hotel damage by the size of the dog, and rental housing research in the United States, Britain and Australia finds pet damage uncommon, modest and covered by an ordinary deposit. Studies of tens of thousands of dogs find smaller dogs, on average, more fearful, more excitable and quicker to snap than larger ones. No law requires a weight limit, and no commercial liability policy Roch Dog found asks for one. Set against the Dog Aging Project, the typical limit turns away more than half of American dogs.

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"Every hotel in America and Britain already has to welcome the largest dogs it will ever see, the guide dogs, under one test: is the dog under control?" said Guise Bule, founder and CEO of Roch Dog. "The weight limit turns away the family Labrador before anyone has seen how it behaves. Judge the dog, not the scale."

The paper sets out the alternative, the Friendly Dog Policy, which judges every dog by its behaviour rather than its breed, size or weight. It draws on Roch Dog's assessment of more than 3,000 hotels in 56 countries against the Roch Dog Friendly Standard, and is free to read, with no form to fill in.

Read the paper at https://rochstandard.com/research/the-hotel-dog-weight-limit/

The Roch Dog directory of assessed and ranked dog friendly hotels is at https://rochdog.com