Personal Protection Dog Liability
by Tom Antion
Before I started this site I looked at maybe 30 other sites selling protection dogs. Not one of them I could find bothered to address the topic of liability and insurance. I think they are worried that bringing up the subject would discourage people from buying their dogs. We at Protection Dogs Elite believe in giving you the true picture of what it’s like to own a protection dog so that’s why I’m writing this.
Most people that can afford a well-trained family, executive, or business protection dog have significant assets. These kind of people are targets for frivolous lawsuits and ridiculous lawsuits filed by the perpetrators of crimes. An example would be a mugger tries to knock you down to rob you and then sues you because your dog bit him.
Just like in any other part of your life that has liability connected to it like car insurance, business liability, etc. responsible persons like you should consider insurance to protect you from these kinds of “financial” attacks.
Before I took possession of my family protection dog, I called my homeowner’s insurance agent. In my local office no one had asked them about a personal protection dog that had been bite trained before. They had to get back to me. When they did, the answer was, “absolutely not”.
My agent went on to say that had I not called to ask, they most likely would have covered me if a bite ever happened, but that they would then immediately drop me from future insurance with them. I said, “Even with my many year track record with your company, you would drop me?” Answer was, “Yes”.
So, I started looking for another answer. There must be insurance companies who would cover a personal protection dog. I found there were very few. I ended up with a company called X Insurance who incidentally covers lion and tigers (I wonder what my homeowners insurance people would have thought about a nice friendly 500 pound tiger? hahaha).
The premium wasn’t all that bad, I think it’s about $60/month. I might add that X Insurance isn’t your typical state regulated insurance company. In fact, my homeowner’s agent looked at their policy and “special clauses” and disclaimers and rolled her eyes. One of the reasons I took their insurance was simply to show I was a responsible protection dog owner if anything ever did happen.
Rubix Makes a Great Impression
I had to make a trip to my insurance agent’s office on an unrelated matter. I took Rubix with me fully expecting to just leave him in the car while I went in to see my agent. During the course of our meeting, it came up that they had turned me down on covering my dog. It turns out that everyone in the office loves dogs and they begged me to bring in Rubix (apparently it’s a rare thing to see a $50,000.00 dog).
After everyone in the office loving on Rubix for a few minutes and Rubix lapping it all up, it was back to my meeting. Rubix was totally quiet sitting under my chair and the agent just couldn’t get over how well-behaved and personable he is. I guess the mentality of most people including insurance agents is that any dog trained to bite a human must be some kind of frothing at the mouth, death machine.
The agent said to me, “Let me check on something. She made a few calls and told me she could give me an umbrella policy that had no exclusions for personal protection dogs with a really high policy limit for a little over $200 per year. I said, “I’ll take it.”
What’s interesting to me is that well-trained and well-selected personal protection dogs are highly obedient and well tempered. In most everyone’s opinion who knows these dogs they would say you are much less likely to be involved in an accidental dog bite situation with one of these dogs as opposed to a typical dog from the pound.