The Dog You're Not Allowed to Own

There are currently sixty-two dog breeds that may be kept in a Housing Development Board flat in Singapore. The list runs from Affenpinscher to Yorkshire Terrier. It includes the Bichon Frise, the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, the Maltese, the Pug, and the Shih Tzu. It does not include the Golden Retriever, the Labrador Retriever, the Border Collie, the Beagle, the Cocker Spaniel, or any dog whose shoulder height exceeds 55 centimetres.

The list was compiled in 1989. It has not been comprehensively revised since. It is still the law.

The rationale in 1989 was size and noise. HDB flats are small — the median resale flat is approximately 100 square metres — and stacked vertically, with shared walls, common corridors, and lift lobbies. The working assumption was that larger dogs would be harder to manage in this environment: louder, more active, more spatially demanding, and therefore more disruptive to neighbours. Sixty-two breeds were identified as small and quiet enough to be permitted. Everything else was not.

The science of what size predicts

In 2022, a research team led by Kathleen Morrill published a paper in Science that remains the most comprehensive genetic study of dog behaviour ever conducted. The team sequenced the genomes of over 2,000 dogs across 78 breeds, combined the results with survey data from approximately 18,000 dogs, and measured the correlation between breed and behavioural traits including aggression, fear, trainability, and sociability.

The finding that attracted the most attention was this: breed accounts for only about 9 per cent of the variation in individual dog behaviour. The remaining 91 per cent is explained by individual variation, early experience, socialisation, training, and owner behaviour. A Golden Retriever is, in statistical terms, a very poor predictor of how any specific dog will behave in a flat in Bukit Timah.

The HDB list does not cite any behavioural science. It predates the science that would be necessary to cite. In 1989, the science of canine genetics, temperament, and breed-behaviour correlation was in its infancy. The list was a reasonable policy response given the information available at the time. The problem is that it has not been updated as the information improved.

The K-9 paradox

Singapore Police Force K-9 units work with Labrador Retrievers, Belgian Malinois, German Shepherds, and Dutch Shepherds. When a police dog retires, it is typically rehomed with its handler — who may live in an HDB flat. The Singapore Civil Defence Force has a similar programme. In 2022, NParks formalised an exemption: retired working dogs, including guide dogs for the visually impaired, may be kept in HDB flats regardless of breed or size.

This means a Labrador Retriever that spent eight years sniffing luggage at Changi Airport may legally live in an HDB flat. The same Labrador Retriever, purchased as a puppy by a family who want a gentle, trainable family dog, may not. The distinction is not behavioural. It is occupational history.

Project ADORE and what it proved

In 2012, HDB launched Project ADORE — Adopt and Own a Rehomed Dog. The programme allowed residents of HDB flats to keep one Singapore Special (local mongrel) even if the dog exceeded the standard height limit, provided the dog was adopted from a welfare group, sterilised, and microchipped. More than 3,000 Singapore Specials were processed through the programme over a decade. The welfare group Action for Singapore Dogs alone rehomed over 600 dogs through ADORE.

What Project ADORE demonstrated was that mixed-breed dogs above the size limit — the very dogs excluded by the 1989 framework — could be successfully kept in HDB flats. There was no documented wave of neighbour complaints specific to ADORE dogs. There was no documented increase in bite incidents or noise complaints attributable to the programme. What there was, instead, was evidence that the problem the size limit was designed to prevent could be managed by other means: owner screening, mandatory sterilisation, and community responsibility courses.

Where the list leads

The HDB approved breed list has shaped Singapore's pet market in ways that are difficult to unpick. Small breeds — Malteses, Shih Tzus, Poodles — are commercially dominant partly because they are the only option for the 80 per cent of Singapore's population that lives in public housing. This has created a market incentive for the breeding of small dogs at volume and price points that welfare advocates find troubling. It has also created a parallel market in which Singapore residents who want a medium or large dog either buy a private property or keep a prohibited dog and hope not to be reported.

AVS does not publish data on the enforcement of the breed restrictions, but welfare groups say that illegal large dogs in HDB flats are an open secret. The Singapore Special, whose mixed parentage frequently produces dogs above the 55cm limit, is among the most commonly surrendered and euthanised dogs in Singapore partly for this reason. Families that did not realise their rescue puppy would grow beyond the limit have nowhere legal to put it.

The list was written in 1989. Nobody voted on it. It has not been put to a public consultation in the way that the Cat Management Framework was. It shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of dogs and the families who want them. In a country that revised its cat policy after four decades of evidence, the question of whether the dog list might also be due for review is not radical. It is, in fact, overdue.