You’ve probably seen it before. A list of dog-friendly cafés in Bangkok, each one given a rating — paws, percentages, stars, tiers. This place is 100% dog-friendly. This place is 50%. This place is 25%. The implication is simple: higher number, better experience.
We don’t believe in this. We never have. And the longer we’ve worked on Pup Cities, the more certain we’ve become that ranking systems are the wrong tool for the job we’re trying to do.
This article is about why.
“Dog-friendly” isn’t a property. It’s a fit.
Here’s the first thing rankings get wrong: they treat dog-friendliness as a quality a place either has or doesn’t have, in greater or lesser amounts. As if you could measure it the way you measure the size of a venue or the price of a coffee.
You can’t. Dog-friendliness isn’t a property of the place. It’s a fit between three things: a specific dog, a specific owner, and a specific moment in their life.
A café that allows dogs anywhere, has water bowls at every table, and offers a dog menu would score near the top of any ranking. But for a reactive dog who finds other dogs stressful, that same café — full of other dogs at lunchtime — is the last place they should be.
Meanwhile, a quiet courtyard restaurant that asks dogs to stay outside on the patio would score lower. But for a senior dog who loves the breeze and dozes off easily, it’s perfect.
The ranking sees one of these as a 5-paw place and the other as a 2-paw place. The dogs in question would tell you the opposite.
A real example
We’ve been thinking about a specific case for a while, and it’s the clearest way to explain what we mean.
Imagine a small café in your neighbourhood. They allow dogs, but only in their garden — not inside. Their indoor space is tiny: a few tables, a counter, room for maybe ten people. Adding dogs to that mix, alongside the kids who often come in with their parents, would make the space chaotic for everyone — including the dogs.
By the standard ranking logic, this place scores low. Dogs can’t come inside. Points off. Less dog-friendly.
Now imagine the person who lives down the street. Every morning, they walk their dog past this café. They stop in, order a coffee, and sit in the garden for twenty minutes while their dog sniffs around the lawn, says hello to the staff, and settles down at their feet. It’s the highlight of their morning. The dog visibly loves it. The owner loves it. It works.
For this person and this dog, the café is perfect. A “low score” place is, in practice, their favourite place in the world.
And the café’s decision to keep the indoor area dog-free? That isn’t a failure. It’s a thoughtful choice. They’ve thought about their actual space and made an honest call: we can welcome dogs, but only where it actually works for everyone — including the dogs themselves. That’s good judgment. A ranking system marks it down anyway, because the ranking system doesn’t know how to read judgment. It only knows how to count features.
What rankings actually measure
If you look at how dog-friendliness scores are typically built, the criteria are predictable:
- Are dogs allowed inside?
- Are dogs allowed outside only?
- Is the dog required to be in a bag or carrier?
- Is water provided?
- Are treats provided?
- Is there a dog menu?
- Are there other dogs around?
These are the things rankings can measure, because these are the things you can check off a list. And so these become what dog-friendly gets reduced to: a checklist of features any place can be measured against.
But notice what’s missing. None of these criteria ask about the dog. None of them ask about the owner. None of them ask whether the experience actually works for the people involved. They measure the venue’s policies in isolation, as if a
place’s friendliness existed independently of the dogs and humans interacting with it.
It doesn’t. It can’t. And the moment you accept that, the whole project of ranking dog-friendly places starts to feel like measuring the wrong thing entirely.
Rankings judge places. We’d rather understand them.
There’s a second problem with ranking systems, and it has nothing to do with the dogs.
A score, by its nature, puts every venue in competition with every other venue. It tells the 3-paw café that they’re falling short of the 5-paw café. It tells the garden-only place that they’re losing to the bag-required place. It creates a leaderboard where, by definition, most places aren’t at the top.
This is an adversarial way to think about the spaces opening their doors to dogs in our city. And we don’t think it’s the right one.
The reality is that Bangkok is full of cafés, restaurants, hotels, parks, and shops that are figuring out, in real time, how to share their space with dogs and the people who love them. Some are doing it brilliantly. Some are doing it cautiously. Some are doing it for the first time. A few are doing it badly. But almost all of them are making genuine, thoughtful efforts — often in spaces and conditions that weren’t originally designed for dogs at all.
These places aren’t competitors in a contest. They’re partners in something larger: the slow, generational work of building a city where dogs can be part of everyday life. You don’t build that city by scoring the people who are showing up to build it with you. You build it by working with them — by understanding what they’re doing, why they’re doing it that way, and what they could do better.
Ranking puts the venue on a scoreboard. Understanding puts them at a table.
We’d rather sit at the table.
What we do instead
If we don’t give you a score, what do we give you?
The honest answer: we give you the facts. The same facts the rankings use to build their score — and several more — but without converting them into a number that hides everything underneath.
When we feature a place on Pup Cities, we strive to provide you with as much detail as possible, so you can have an idea of what the location looks like and whether it fits you and your dog.
None of this is a judgment. It’s a description. It’s what an honest friend would tell you about a place before you went, so that you could decide whether it suited the dog you actually have and the day you’re actually planning.
This is more work than a number. It takes longer to read. It doesn’t fit on a sticker. But it gives you the one thing a ranking can never give you: the chance to make the call yourself.
You are the only expert who matters
Here’s the part of this we believe most deeply.
When it comes to deciding whether a place is right for your dog, you are the only person who can possibly know. Not us. Not a ranking site. Not your friends. Not the venue itself. You.
You know if your dog loves a crowd or needs a quiet corner. You know whether they’re confident with new spaces or take a long time to settle. You know if today was already a big day for them, or if they’ve been at home and need the stimulation. You know if you want a quick coffee stop or a long, slow afternoon. You know if the heat is bothering them today. You know if their hips have been stiff this week. You know whether they tolerate the elevator at this particular mall, or whether they hate it.
A ranking knows none of this. It never could. The information that actually matters — about your dog, in your context, on this day — lives entirely in your head. The best a stranger can do is give you accurate information about the place and trust you to do the rest.
That’s what we try to do.
So when we say we don’t rank — this is what we mean
We don’t rank because dog-friendliness isn’t a quality that can be ranked. We don’t rank because the cafés and parks and spaces of Bangkok aren’t in a competition. We don’t rank because the judgment about whether a place fits your life belongs to you, not to us.
What we offer instead is something quieter and, we think, more useful: reliable, curated, honest information. We tell you what a place is, not what it scores. We let you decide what fits.
Don’t let anyone rank your experience with your dog. Only you know what’s best for you and your dog.
That’s the whole brief.
Over to you
What’s a place that works perfectly for you and your dog — even if a ranking would mark it down? We’d love to hear about it.
Drop us a comment. We’ll be reading.
