Paw Rights
Paw Rights
Go to app: Here
Do you have assistance dog access refusals? Have you been denied access to transport (e.g. taxis, trains) or hospitality venues (restaurants, hotels)? Would you like a mobile app to help you record what happened and have an organised summary of the event sent to your email?
The Paw Rights App allows you to record assistance dog access refusals and have documentation of the event sent to your email, along with links of where to make a complaint. ➡➡ Go To Paw Rights
Please try the app out and we welcome your feedback about improving it.
This app is a part of a national study. With your help, enough data will be gathered to document the full national problem of assistance dog refusals. We will anonymously be grouping refusals together (no individual names of course) to aggregate the number and types of refusals happening across Australia. These overall anonymous counts can be used to understand how large the problem is and where it is happening the most.
Latest Research
Yes, it is an assistance dog! (2025)
Muller, Amanda; Scheibner, James; Geller, Georgia; Fraser-Barbour, Ellen
Assistance dog refusals and misunderstandings about their legal status occur in all aspects of public life. Emergency services agencies are not immune to this problem, given the quick decisions that need to be made under duress.
Amanda Muller, James Scheibner, Georgia Geller and Ellen Fraser-Barbour
Despite Australian legislation protecting the public access rights of assistance dog handlers, they are frequently denied entry to public places, with legal recourse undermined by jurisdictional inconsistencies, rarely awarded damages, and uneven criminal penalties across states. The article analyses these legislative gaps and proposes law reform recommendations using the Responsive Regulation framework.
This project has been approved by Flinders University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (Project ID 4576).