My brother recently lost one of his Rottweilers to old age and was considering rescuing another one. However, his homeowner insurance agent told him that they will not renew his insurance policy if they know he owns that breed of dog. Apparently GSDs were included in the list of dogs they would not cover. Has anyone experience with this here in Michigan? I would like a little more background before I call my own insurance agent.
I was told the same thing by State Farm when we lived in Ohio so we went with Nationwide.
Here is MA I was told that insurance companies can not cancel you nor raise your rates because of the “breed” of your dog. Such treatment has to be attached to a bite.
We have Meemic (Michigan company for educators) for auto and home insurance and I pay $50 per year additional for each German Shepherd. They must have a list of breeds because I don’t have to pay anything for Coke (mix). I don’t really care though since we get such a good rate (double the coverage we would have got from the big name companies, for a little less) and they have been easy to deal with. When we rented we had All State renters and they did not care about GSDs. I prefer to be up front about everything so I asked before we decided on an insurance provider.
We have State Farm in IN and have never been asked. Pitbulls are the breed that you need special insurance in our area. I don’t believe any other breed requires extra insurance but I would have to look into it.
“State Farm does not refuse insurance based on the breed of dog a customer owns in any U.S. state”.
http://learningcenter.statefarm.com/safety-2/family-1/its-not-the-breed-its-the-bite/index.html
This is the info I found on the State Farm website, but it doesn’t say anything about charging extra.
We had nationwide and no problems (New York State) but they were quite expensive to homeowner, cars and our business insurance thru, so we are shopping arount and running into this problem. Nationwide actually gave a credit for dogs w/CGC or OB titles.
Copied this from the internet;
Only Pennsylvania and Michigan have laws that prohibit insurers from canceling or denying coverage based on breed, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
This came up at schutzhund training and one of the gals gets a discount from her insurance company for having a protection trained dog. It is a definite deterrent to home break-ins.
I agree with Lies that it is important to be up front with your insurance carrier. The last thing you want is to have an incident and your insurance to say “we didn’t even know there was a dog!” We do carry an extra policy for our dogs.
In Ohio, State Farm was good. Nationwide was also good about it. There are several carriers that will cover GSDs, I think. It’s tougher with Rottweilers and Pits. Some may require obedience classes or give the (above mentioned) bonus points for CGC.
We’re in Bloomfield (metro Detroit) and have Citizens for our home/auto and have no extra fees for Roman.