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When it comes to warranties and insurance, predictive values are important, and fortunes are made by determining the correct digits to place to the right of a point mark.
What does this have to do with dogs?
Quite a lot.
You see, pet insurance companies are in a competitive business to get your dollar. If they get the numbers wrong, and price a premium too high, potential customers may forgo pet insurance altogether or else sign up with a competitor's plan. On the other hand, if the company routinely prices insurance premiums too low, they may push themselves into bankruptcy.
And so, pet insurance companies have collected data on hundreds of thousands of dogs and analyzed that data, in order to assign correct premiums to predictive risks.
What do pet insurance companies tell us? Basically, three things:
- The size of the dog matters.
As a general rule, larger dogs do not live as long as smaller dogs. This is not closely held information. As a major British pet insurance company notes: "Typically, larger pets are more expensive, so ... a terrier will be cheaper then a Labrador." - The breed matters.
Not all breeds of dogs are equally healthy. This is not closely held information, as any review of Kennel Club breed health surveys makes clear. If you are looking to get complete health care coverage (as opposed to a catastrophic plan to cover vehicle impacts), your premium will rise or fall depending on the breed. - Mongrels are healthier than pedigree dogs.
Again, this is not closely held information. As a major British pet insurance company reports: "A survey by the [insurance company] found almost 40 per cent of pedigree pet policy holders will make a claim on their insurance compared to just over 20 per cent of cross-breed owners." David Pickett, pet insurance manager at Sainsbury's Bank notes that "While it is imperative all cats and dogs are adequately insured, our experience is that pedigree owners are more likely to call on their pet insurance for illness and disease than owners of crossbreeds because their animals are more likely to suffer certain hereditary illnesses."
What else do we find by looking at the fencing-in of risk by insurance companies?
Well, for one thing, we find that some pet insurance companies are willing to extend insurance to older cross-bred dogs, but not to older pedigree dogs.
Embrace Pet Insurance, for example, will insure a mixed breed dog up to 8 years of age, but the cut-off for purebred dogs is 6 years.
What's that about?
Simple: Taken as a whole, there is a "health gap" between cross-bred and pedigree dogs, and that gap is about two years. The insurance industry is simply mirroring in policy, what has been proven true on the ground.
Why are pedigree dogs less healthy than their mongrel cousins?
One factor is that many breeds are positively selected for exaggeration.
Flat-faced breeds which have been selected for brachycephalism, for example, are far more likely to suffer from cleft palettes, breathing problems, and eye injuries than cross-bred dogs which have better snouts.
Dogs that have been selected for the benched legs associated with achondroplasia (a kind of dwarfism) are more likely to have heart problems and joint problems.
Giant breeds are more likely to die of gastric torsion, heart problems and cancer, while teacup breeds are more likely to suffer from neurological and dental issues.
Dogs bred for wrinkles are much more likely to have skin problems, while dogs bred for screw tails or very long backs, are more likely to have vertebrate problems.
Another problem with purebred dogs, of course, is inbreeding. Here the issues are best observed not by looking at dogs through the lens of purebred vs. mongrel, but by looking at dogs, within breeds, that have higher or lower coefficients of inbreeding (COI).
Here too the data is rather unambiguous: Dogs with higher coefficients of inbreeding tend to get sick sooner, and die sooner, than their less inbred counterparts, a fact that holds true for breeds as varied as the Rhodesian Ridgeback, the Dachshund, and the Standard Poodle.
How does this translate down to the realities of pedigree dog ownership?
Simple: Purebred dogs are, on the whole, sicker more often that their cross-bred brethren, and as a consequence the vet bills of purebed dog owners can be expected to be 15% higher says Saga Pet Insurance.
Pet insurance premiums, of course, reflect this reality. As the PetGuard Insurance company notes on its home page:
If you own a pedigree dog or cat, you are more likely to incur greater veterinary expnse (sorry!) due to the degree of inbreeding that has to occur ... pedigree cats and dogs are more likely to suffer from respiratory or hereditary conditions.
Bottom line: If you are looking for the healthiest dog possible, stay away from Kennel Club dogs and look for a mongrel that weighs between 10 and 40 pounds and which has a real snout.
Is that dog guaranteed to be healthy? Nope.
But, as the pet insurance industry will tell you, the odds are certainly tipped quite a lot in your favor.
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5 comments:
I have a vision of making life tables for different dog breeds. Fun.
I have really conflicting feelings about this information.
Having grown up in the medical field and experiencing the figurative rape that insurance companies do to doctors, I somewhat understand why insurance companies do what they do. Of course they're not going to want to pay out for ongoing illnesses because that's going to affect the whole input/output of money thing. Large breeds have certain conditions and purebreds in general will incur more cost. But on the other side of the coin, it's frustrating to hear about this because it's almost like the insurance company wants to tell US what THEY think we can afford and therefore, decide for us which dogs we can own. I'm a big dog person myself, but I also know what I'm going into getting one, and I'm not going to get such a dog until I'm financially secure enough to afford basic care and the occasional emergency if needed.
I'm just glad pet insurance isn't required yet. Paying out of pocket gets expensive, but I'd rather just do it myself rather than have someone behind a desk decide for me how much they think I owe THEM to pay the vet some really low reimbursement rate.
Some questions come to mind: Could it be that purebred owners are more likely to purchase pet insurance? Or that they are taking their dogs to the Vet more frequently for routine care which results in diagnostic tests turning up problems that might be present in mixes too but the owners don't take them in as often? Same with the age factor - could it be that more owners of senior purebreds are taking the dogs in to the Vet's regularly than owners of senior mixes?
Without the data on how many purebred policies the company sold vs. how many mix policies, we are only getting part of the picture. Likewise, and this may be impossible to calculate because perhaps not all visits are claimable, we'd have to know how frequently each dog is taken to the Vet's.
Dogs are not dying years earlier from serious health problems because their owners are buying insurance or not buying insurance.
In fact, if pedigree dog owners were taking their dogs to the vet more often, and those dogs were as healthy as mutts, the pedigree dogs should be living longer.
But they are not; they are dying sooner.
The vets are not killing the dogs, nor are the dogs committing suicide.
What is killing dogs is Kennel Club breed standards and closed registries.
There is a reason there are no wild animals with achondroplasia or brachycephalism, and there is a reason inbred animals do not thrive in the wild (see the wolf story posted today).
Finally, just a note about insurance: premiums go up or down based on expected health outcomes for a breed, not on how many dogs of that breed sign up for insurance. The same is true for humans when it comes to insurance sold by sex, race, nationality, smoker or nonsmoker, etc.
As for the demographics of dogs and dog insurance, about half of all dogs owned are mutts, and about half are purebred (many purebred dogs are not registered). Of the dogs that have health insurance, about one third are mongrels or mixed breeds, and two-thirds are purebred. To put that another way: mongrels or mixed breeds are the most numerically large "breed" in any dog insurance data base.
The bottom line is that the reason there are differences in insurance rates between breeds and beteen purebred dogs and mongrels is as given: pedigree dogs are generally inbred by design and are often selected for defect. Some purebred dogs are more messed up than others, but very few pedigree breeds are as healthy as mongrels of the same size.
Patrick
It would be good if the insurance companies were able to distinguish in their figures between the more and less inbred parts of a breed.
My cats are unregistered old style Siamese. Their mother was bred from two different remnant old style lines in Australia and their father was imported from Holland. His recent ancestry includes old style lines from Ecuador, Russia, Switzerland and Holland. I'm pretty confident that my cats can expect to enjoy the good health and long lives that earlier generations of old style Siamese were noted for. (OK, this isn't quite true as the early Siamese imports and their progeny were quite vulnerable to Western cat diseases but this is a common enough phenomenon when people or animal travel into a new disease environment and is overcome with time.)
Anyway I believe that whilst some breeds, such as in the Dalmatian story that you published, might need out-crossing with other breeds, there are other breeds whose health could be improved considerably by bringing in unregistered animals of the breed. I believe that this already happens on a small scale with Salukis and Basenjis.
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