"Nooooooooooo doooooooooogs alloooooooooooooowwwwwwwed... yoooooooooooou'rrrrrrrreeeeee noooooooooot our crooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwd..."
No animals allowed. A common saying of many establishments from hotels, to restaurants to office spaces. For whatever reason, the pets or just animals in general, are denied entry to a particular setting and are forced to look elsewhere at best or recognize they don't belong at worst. In most cases, while the human or superior race can access facilities with ease, pets are barred access for a multitude of reasons.
A sub-trope of Can't You Read the Sign? that applies specifically to this conflict. Usually Played for Laughs but sometimes can be used for drama should a character be very attached to their pet. In some cases, it can be an allegory for civil rights and being wrongfully barred from places of attendance based on appearances. An example includes the racist spin "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" which uses the label of "dog" as a slang for inferiors and undesirables, though this has become heavily outdated. Often the characters will choose to overcome these barriers, but sometimes the characters realize it's simply too much trouble.
In fantasy and science fiction, in universe, this can be upended as humans are not always a dominant race. It can be inverted to great effect with some animals barring other animals from being admitted, or more humorously, barring humans. Should aliens or other humanoids exist in the story, depending on the level of intelligence and the degree of interspecies conflict, this trope can apply in specific circumstances.
There is some Truth in Television behind this, as pets tend to unleash chaos in the form of causing damage, disrupting settings, distracting people and of course leaving...droppings. From a human perspective, there is little to stop this idea from existing as it's simply too much to deal with animals on a frequent basis. That said, there are exceptions including the valid utilization of service animals. There may exist plenty of real life examples to draw from but No Real Life Examples, Please!.
See also Species-Specific Afterlife and Secret Pet Plot.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A French phonebook ad showed a family attempting to sneak their dog into a hotel, before mentioning how easily it would have been, using the phonebook, to find a hotel that accepts pets.
Anime & Manga
- In Coffee & Cat, Kon mentions running into this problem since he literally can't function without his cat M'Lady around. He's essentially barred from most cafes since they don't allow pets inside, and he ultimately flunked his university exams because the teachers discovered M'Lady while Kon was in the process of taking it.
- In the Warrior Cats Tigerstar and Sasha manga, one scene in the second volume has Sasha wandering into a shop and getting chased out as soon as she's spotted. She's so startled by the experience that she ends up getting lost as she flees.
Comic Books
- Billy & Buddy:
- One comic, the family tries to find a restaurant to get dinner, but they keep getting turned away because all restaurants have a policy against dogs. Eventually, a Chinese restaurant allows Bill to enter, but Bill is frightened by the owner due to the strong implications that he is only allowed inside to be served as the main course.
- A recurring problem in single-story album "Globe-trotters", requiring to Paper-Thin Disguise Bill as a human, notably to get him on planes.
Films — Animation
- Lady and the Tramp There is a sign that says "No Dogs Allowed" at the entrance of the zoo. The Tramp gets around this by inciting a fight between the guard and a visitor, allowing him and Lady to enter the zoo undetected.
- In Shaun the Sheep Movie, there is a sign that says "No Dogs Allowed" at the enterance of the hospital in the Big City, which is a problem for Bitzer the sheepdog as he wants to rescue his owner. So, Bitzer wears surgeon outfit in order to enter the hospital, but unfortunately, he was eventually caught.
- Snoopy, Come Home: A Running Gag that Snoopy and Woodstock are forced to come head to head with wherever they go, as they consistently find places with signs that read "No Dogs Allowed!" (In the case of the hospital where Snoopy's original owner is staying, the sign says "No Dogs or Birds Allowed!") Played for Laughs at the end when Snoopy is glad to use this as an excuse to reunite with Charlie Brown and leave his original owner.
(sung in a sinister bass by Thurl Ravenscroft)No dogs allowed...You're not our crowd...Obey the signs...And boundary lines...You're out of place...You bark and chase...You're not our crowd...No dogs allowed...
- In The Emperor's New Groove, Pacha and Kuzco are hungry for lunch, but the diner has a prominent "No Llamas" sign, so Kuzco walks on two legs and wears Pacha's outer poncho as a dress to get inside. (This actually works; he has to flee from the diner not because he's revealed to actually be a llama, but because Yzma found him.)
Films — Live-Action
- 1BR: Sarah moves into an apartment complex and smuggles her cat in. A couple of days afterwards, a note is slipped under Sarah's door telling her she's violating the "No Pets" policy. The note also has something like "SOME TENANTS ARE ALLERGIC YOU SELFISH BITCH" written on it in red. The trope is ultimately enforced. Poor kitty.
- Babe: Pig in the City features this as a core challenge for the pig Babe and the farmer's wife who are routinely barred from admission to hotels because of having not just a pet, but an unorthodox one. Later played with as they do find a place for pets even though they find out that the hotel doesn't operate on an official capacity.
- Inverted in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. When Ms. Price, Professor Brown and the kids land on the Isle of Nanboombu, which is populated by Uplifted Animals, a bear shows them a sign reading "No Peopling Allowed".
- Deconstructed in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes when, over time, apes are used as slaves for their human overlords instead of pets when their intelligence grows and later reconstructed when humans attempt to bar them as inferiors. As a war breaks out, it doesn't end well for the humans.
- Subverted in Fist of Fury. When Chen Zhen decides to visit a park in Shanghai, the guard bars him while pointing out a sign forbidding dogs or Chinese from entering. But then a woman with a dog enters the park in full view of the guard without trouble. A Japanese guy then suggests Chen might get in if he acts like a dog.
- Averted in John Wick: Chapter 2 as John is able to leave his new dog at the Continental without issue. Played with in that the dog must remain under the watch of Charon.
- In the Madeline movie, a dog helps Madeline out of the river she fell into. The girls name the dog Genevieve and want to keep her, but Miss Clavel says no because she's allergic to dogs and pets aren't allowed in the boarding school.
- Played for Drama in Marie Antoinette (2006). Marie has her beloved dog Mops taken from her upon entering France because it's proof of her original nationality and it would be bad for the marriage. Marie does get other dogs, though.
- The Rental: Dogs aren't allowed at the Air BNB, but Josh brings his beloved dog Reggie along with him. The owner's brother, Taylor, gets a very brief Pet the Dog where he tells the characters that he doesn't mind having dogs, and it's his brother's rule.
- In the live action film Scooby-Doo, big dogs aren't allowed to board the plane to Spooky Island, so Scooby Doo is forced to dress up as Shaggy's grandmother.
- Subverted in Young Adult. Mavis clearly expects the motel where she stays not to accept dogs, and so smuggles her tiny Chihuahua in a backpack. The clerk tells her that they do allow dogs, to which Mavis replies that she's glad, because she has a dog in her car. As the bag is audibly snuffling and moving.
- In Dog Days (2018), Ruth and Greg dump their Big Friendly Dog Charlie on Dax, despite the fact that he lives in a pet-free building. He's forced to smuggle Charlie in and out of the building in a box on wheels with airholes for his morning walks.
- Molly (1983): Aunt Jenny initially sends Maxie to a Catholic boarding school, where Maxie hides Molly in the mechanical room and smuggles meat to her. This plotline doesn't last very long, because almost as soon as they arrive, Jones kidnaps Molly, and then Sister Carmel, who thinks Maxie's behavioral problems are because of the changes in her life, sends her back to live with Aunt Jenny.
- Larger than Life: While trying to explain why he shouldn't be forced to inherit his dead father's elephant, Jack tells the attorney, "I've got an apartment with a no pet clause." The attorney replies, "I'll slap a lien on that."
Literature
- Angela Nicely: In “Puppy Love!”, Angela accidentally walks two dogs (one belonging to her classmate and one belonging to her neighbour) into a garden that doesn’t allow dogs and is yelled at by a woman.
- In Borgel, when the characters visit the Great Popsicle museum, they get into a dispute about whether Fafner, an intelligent talking dog, can be allowed in and whether they have to pay for them. Fafner bites the manager, Hapless Toad, for ripping them off, and when they later return Hapless Toad has erected a "no animals allowed" sign.
- In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the Heffleys accidentally end up with a pet pig in "The Long Haul". So when they stay at a motel and the pig eats from the mini-bar, they have to pay for the food, and for breaking the "no pet" rule.
- In The Famous Five, George cannot bear to be separated from Timmy her dog, so she rarely visits places where pets are not allowed, providing some examples where this trope is inverted and played straight:
- George is allowed to take Timmy to her boarding school, which is her main reason for agreeing to go. The boys mention that no pets are allowed at their school.
- In Five Have a Wonderful Time, George is not allowed to take Timmy into Faynights Castle. As the others disappear inside, he imagines the castle is an enormous church, as George sometimes disappears to on Sundays. He finds his way into the castle anyway, which later leads them to a secret passage.
- Jennings:
- No pets are allowed at Linbury Court, which causes chaos in Thanks to Jennings when Atkinson's grandmother, ignorant of the rules, gives him a guinea pig. Mr Wilkins has to look after it until she returns to collect it, but when the animal gets loose, Jennings finds it and feels obliged to keep it secret.
- In The Jennings Report, Jennings and Darbishire rescue a hibernating hedgehog and bring it back to school. Their attempts to look after the animal, while keeping it secret, drive the plot for the entire book.
- In Jennings at Large, Jennings makes friends with a girl named Emma, who lives in a block of flats that doesn't allow pets, but due to her Chronic Hero Syndrome has gathered a sizable menagerie. When it seems like the caretaker may be about to discover her secret, Jennings decides he has to help out. Since her flat is directly above his aunt's, they try lowering the animals via the window. Unfortunately, the local gossips are visiting his aunt, and happen to stumble on the hedgehog....
- The Witches, the hero takes his pet mice to the Hotel Magnificent, where they are discovered by a maid. The manager tells the boy and his grandmother that mice are not allowed in the hotel; the grandmother tells the manager that his rotten hotel is full of rats anyway, and threatens to contact the public health authorities. The manager compromises by allowing the mice as long as they stay in their cage, and the maid tells the boy that the first mouse to break this rule will be drowned in a bucket of water.
- When My Heart Joins the Thousand: At the zoo, new employee Toby stupidly goes into Chance the one-winged hawk's cage. Chance attacks him, and his rich parents threaten to sue, so the zoo decides to euthanize Chance. Alvie kidnaps Chance and takes him to her pet-free apartment, where he poops on everything. Alvie unsuccessfully tries to disguise the smell with Pine-Sol and tells her landlord it's because she ate Mexican food and had a bad reaction, but when her neighbors start complaining about the noises, she decides to anonymously drop Chance off at the Elmbrooke Wildlife Center.
- Almost Perfect (2014): Benny's dad and stepmom won't let him have a dog, and his dad particularly hates poodles, so his poodle puppy Breaker lives with Bess, and Benny helps train him and take care of him after school.
Live-Action TV
- In El Chavo del ocho, there're some episodes when El Chavo or some of his friends adopted a puppy from the streets to take care of it, as well Dona Clotilde having a cute little dog pet (called as "Satanás" aka Satan in Spanish). In both cases, they had to hide the dogs because Dona Florinda doesn't like animals in general and put the "No Pets Allowed" sign in the Vecindad with the warning of throwing them to the streets if she finds one of them.
- Inverted in the Fawlty Towers episode "The Kipper and the Corpse": Mrs Chase has a little lap dog in the dining room, which sits on a chair at the dining table, eats sausages, and ends up biting both Manuel and Polly.
Mrs Chase: If dogs are allowed in the dining room, at least the staff should know how to handle them.
- In a segment of Not the Nine O'Clock News, a sign in a park is seen saying "No Dogs, No Cycling, No Smoking, No Fishing", and then the camera cuts away to a dog on a bicycle with a cigarette and a fishing rod leaving the park.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): Invoked in "The Hunt" about Heaven...or, as it turns out, Hell. Abe is told he has to leave behind his beloved dog Rip in order to enter Heaven, which he rejects because dogs should be allowed in Heaven. The Twist Ending reveals that this was actually the Devil's last attempt at trying to get Abe into Hell, where dogs are not allowed because they would smell the brimstone and warn their masters.
Video Games
- In Love & Pies, Sebastian hates pets running around in establishments, so he tries convincing Amelia to get her dog out of the café.
- Persona 3: In FES, you could invite your friends to the movies, which include Koromaru. You get booted out of the movies because they don't allow animals into the theater. It somehow raises your courage because of that dumb decision but you promise to get Koromaru the movie on DVD.
- In Persona 4, Yukiko's parents, who run an inn, forbid her from taking in a dog for reasons similar to Sojiro's below. Yukiko, distraught at this, briefly runs away from home and encounters Chie for the first time. Chie's family adopts the dog and the two girls become best friends.
- Persona 5:
- When the Player Character brings Morgana to the cafe he lives in, the owner Sojiro initially tries to throw him out. It's a health code violation to keep animals where he publically serves food. But Sojiro caves upon learning the cat has nowhere else to go, and so allows Joker to keep him, but to never let him down from Joker's living space in the attic during store hours and to clean up after the cat every time he comes down.
- Pets can be brought aboard the subway train, but you have to pay an extra fee to do so. The Phantom Thieves forgot to pay the fee one time, so had to pass off Morgana as a stuffed animal that meowed when you touch his head. This lead to the memorable dialogue option, "Time to button mash."
- In Them's Fightin' Herds, Cashmere will tell Pom that her dogs are not allowed in the shop in one of her dialogue triggers. Apparently, she made that mistake before and doesn't want it to happen again. Worth noting that even though all of the characters are sentient animals, the sheep dogs don't have the same level of intelligence.
Web Original
- In Protectors of the Plot Continuum, pets aren't allowed on missions. This caused a bit of drama in one mission, where an agent thought her carrier pigeon would be useful, but he wasn't allowed.
Western Animation
- In an episode of Alphablocks, I gets made the police chief, but she goes on a power trip and makes many things illegal, including pets.
I: "I arrest you in the name of the paw... I mean law!"
- In an episode of Animaniacs, the Warner siblings, who are black-furred humanoids with doglike ears and tails, go back in time and meet Picasso. He says, "No dogs allowed", but they reply, "We're not dogs." He says, "OK then, cats. No cats!". The Warner siblings say, "We're not cats either". After another incorrect guess, they simply say their catchphrase, "No. We're the Warner Brothers! (And the Warner Sister!)"
- Clifford the Big Red Dog: The episode "The Dog Park" revolves around Mr. Bleakman getting fed up with Clifford and the gang "interfering" with his birdwatching. As a result, he has a "no dogs" sign put up in the park he could birdwatch in peace. This backfires, because without dogs in the park, no one has a reason to visit—including the birds. Regretting his actions, Mr. Bleakman takes down the sign and returns the park to normal, teaching viewers the lesson to not be a grump about dogs.
- The Fairly OddParents!:
- In the episode "A Boy and His Dog-Boy", Timmy's fairy dog Sparky was not allowed to go to any places owned by Doug Dimmadome, not even to dog park of all places. Ostriches and other two-legged animals, on the other hand, were allowed. When asked about this, Doug Dimmadome responds that he just hates anything quadrupedal and likes to disappoint them, hence the dog park banning dogs.
- During the Noir Episode "Where's Wanda?", Timmy finds Trixie as she's boarding a plane (a parody of Casablanca) and accuses her of stealing Wanda. The pilot yells at Timmy that no pets are allowed on the plane, pointing to the fish Cosmo. This allows Timmy to realize that since Wanda was also a fish at the time, Trixie couldn't have taken her on the plane.
- A weird variation on Generation O!, where sometimes pets are allowed, but for some reason marsupials aren't, which is a problem since Molly's drummer is a kangaroo:
- In "Damp Sheets", the pilot claims that marsupials aren't allowed on the plane, so Yo-Yo has to ride in the hold. Apparently, however, this was a mistake and the rule was meant to be "No marshmallows".
- In "Deviated Tonsils", Yo-Yo has to be sneaked into the hospital due to the "no marsupials" rule.
- It's Pony: In "Pet Pony", the landlord of the Brambley family's apartment building decides to ban pets after getting caught up in Pony's craziness one too many times.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: In "The Serpent's Pass", Team Avatar have to take a ferry to Ba Sing Se, which doesn't allow animals. Toph, who is blind and comes from a wealthy family, talks her way through by claiming Momo is her "seeing-eye lemur."
- The Legend of Korra: Downplayed. As the New Team Avatar tracks down reports of people throughout the world gaining the ability to airbend in the hope of recruiting them into and helping rebuild the Air Nation, upon arriving in Ba Sing Se, they receive a less-than-stellar welcome in the city when the Earth Queen Hou-Ting sends her Grand Secretariat Gun in her place, who upon seeing Naga and Pabu, the gang's pet polar bear dog and fire ferret, asks that they remain on the gang's airship for the duration of their stay, informing them that the Queen has forbidden any animals be within her presence. Justified, as she's allergic to animal fur, but given that she is strongly implied (and confirmed by Word of God) to have eaten her father's pet bear Bosco, she may just hate pets in general.
- In Little Princess, the Chef makes it very clear that the pets are not allowed in his kitchen unless it's feeding time. If one of them wanders in when it isn't feeding time, he will shoo them out.
- A running gag in Martha Speaks is Martha being offended by people saying, "No dogs allowed". In one episode, she sneaked into a hotel with the Lorraines disguised as an old woman to get around the no pets rule.
- In the Mickey Mouse cartoon "Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip", Mickey and Pluto are thrown out of a train by the conductor (played by Pete) because dogs aren't allowed on board. Mickey then sneaks Pluto into the train and tries to hide him from the conductor.
- 101 Dalmatians: The Series: In the episode "Film Fatale," Lucky wants to go see the Thunderbolt movie at the theater owned by Cruella; unfortunately, they don't allow animals into the theater, so they have to sneak in and spend the episode trying not to get caught.
- The Patrick Star Show: In "Neptune's Ball", the Star family's pet sentient toilet Tinkle isn't allowed into the ball, so Squidina leaves him outside. To get them both in, Lady Upturn disguises Tinkle as a furniture delivery for a gold-plated toilet, then hides inside of him.
- Samurai Jack: In the Season 5 episode "XCVII", Scaramouche reawakens as a disembodied head and tries to get onboard a boat to get to Aku to tell him that Samurai Jack had lost his sword. Unfortunately, he has to deal with an extremely stubborn bouncer who constantly refuses to let him onboard the boat, due to not complying to the dress code, in which a body is mandatory. To bypass this issue, Scaramouche initially tries to put himself on a dog's body to get entry. However, the same bouncer still denies him access because dogs are not allowed onboard, much to Scaramouche's chagrin. Despite this, a group of anthropomorphic dogmen were allowed onboard, most likely due to the fact they actually take offense to being called dogs, as Scaramouche learns the hard way.
- In the Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird short film "Room and Bird", Sylvester and Tweety's respective owners sneak them into the Spinster Arms Hotel, which has a "no pets" policy. In the course of their usual chase, they narrowly avoid being noticed by the manager. At the end, the manager orders all the tenants to remove their pets from the premises... and ends up Trampled Underfoot by an Animal Stampede.
- In an episode of Family Guy, Brian becomes an author for the New Yorker until he admits he never finished college. Upon learning that he's a college dropout, the New Yorker fires him and hangs a "No Dogs Allowed" sign on the door behind him in a Shout-Out to Snoopy, Come Home.
