Insurers Turning Down Coverage For Homeowners With ‘bully’ Dog Breeds

Kay-Lynette Roca gets the panicked call a handful of times each month.

It’s usually a pit bull owner whose dog has never bit anyone, and yet an insurance company is threatening to cancel his homeowner’s policy.

The caller has to give up his dog.

“We encounter it all the time,” said Roca, founding director of Safe Harbor Animal Sanctuary and Hospital, based in Jupiter.

“It is discrimination,” said Roca, who has owned eight pit bulls over the years. “Any dog can bite.”

But to the insurance industry, man’s best friend can sometimes be his enemy.

A number of major insurers won’t write policies for owners of so-called bully breeds, dogs thought to be aggressive even if they’ve shown no history or inclination to attack.

There’s a simple reason some companies are taking a hard line.

Every year, more than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs, and nearly 900,000 of them – half of whom are children – require medical care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When a dog bite victim needs to pay his medical bills, he often seeks payment from the dog owner’s homeowners policy.

The total amount of claims paid out nationally crept up nearly 20 percent between 2003 an 2008, the most years for which data is available.

Dog bites account for a third of all homeowners insurance liability claims, costing $387 million in 2008, according to the Insurance Information Institute. And more than half of bites occur on the dog owner’s property.

In Palm Beach County, there have been 815 reports of dog bites so far this year, up from 776 during the same period last year, said Capt. Dave Walesky, who manages Palm Beach County’s animal control program.

Walesky, who has owned two pit bulls, is working to separate the truly dangerous dogs from those who are suffering a case of stereotyping.

Last year, his department changed its definition of dangerous dogs to include not only ones that had attacked humans but dogs that killed other domestic animals.

The county now has 74 dogs registered as “dangerous” based on prior acts and not breed.

But some insurance companies aren’t willing to bet on certain breeds believed at least by legend to be dangerous.

Owners of pit bulls, including Staffordshire terriers, Dobermans, Rottweilers, chows, Presa Canarios, Akitas, huskies and wolf hybrids cannot get homeowners, condo and renters policies through Castle Key, the subsidiary of Allstate that writes such policies in Florida. United Property & Casualty Insurance excludes the same dogs as Castle Key plus German shepherds, American Eskimos or any mixed breed that is half or more of any of the banned breeds.

State Farm Insurance ignores breed and focuses on a survey dog owners must fill out before they are approved. The form asks whether their dog has a history of bites and if so what measures the owner has taken, such as obedience classes or a fence, to prevent the animal from attacking again.

Excluding dogs based on breed could wrongfully implicate some pets and ignore others that might be more prone to attack, said John Pisula, spokesman for State Farm in Southeast Florida.

“We really look at it as a matter of has the dog had a past history,” he said.

Limiting liability by singling out selected breeds is shortsighted, said Jim Crosby, who has investigated more than 40 dogs involved in a fatal human attack.

Crosby, director of Bay County Animal Control in Florida’s Panhandle, said the range of breeds involved in cases he’s investigated include everything from Lhasa apso to Labrador.

The commonality, Crosby said, was a bad owner, not a bad dog.

“If you’re worried about the dogs, you have to worry about the people who are choosing them,” Crosby said. “There are plenty of pit bulls out there that are service dogs and some that are police dogs

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