Dogs Take Bite Out of Homeowners Insurance

According to the Humane Society of the United States, there are 77.5 million owned dogs in the U.S. One out of every three households, or 39 percent, includes at least one dog.

Unfortunately, those 77.5 million canines bite an estimated 4.7 million Americans each year, sending 800,000 to the emergency room, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So-called "bad dog" lists that grew out of CDC dog bite studies from 1979 to the mid-1990s typically include the pit bull, Rottweiler, German shepherd, Siberian husky, Doberman pinscher, chow chow, Great Dane, Saint Bernard and Akita.

Despite the fact that the CDC's studies were not intended to address dog-bite risk by breed, these larger breeds signaled danger to some homeowners insurance companies.

CDC spokeswoman Gail Hayes calls that a misinterpretation of the data. "Because we do not know how many of a particular breed exists, there is no way for us to then determine which breed may or may not bite more," she says. "You have to have that particular denominator to be able to determine that."

Dog advocates claim these "bad dogs" are getting a bad rap.

Larry Cunningham, assistant dean at St. John's University School of Law in New York, has studied breed discrimination since being denied homeowners insurance coverage in 2003. He says the CDC's 2001 nonfatal dog bite survey provided homeowners insurance companies with what they perceived as hard data to proactively limit their dog-bite risk by breed, despite the CDC's caveat against using its findings in this way.

Cunningham says that the only way to determine if one breed is more likely to bite than another is to count the number of bites per breed, then divide that by the total number of dogs in that breed within the general population.

"Without an accurate count for either, you run the risk of stigmatizing an entire breed as overly dangerous based on the breed's absolute number of bites instead of examining the breed's number of bites relative to its overall population," he says.

The American Kennel Club in New York insists no good can come from "bad dog" lists. "We feel very strongly that it's the deed, not the breed," says AKC spokeswoman Lisa Peterson. "There is no evidence that a dog would be inherently dangerous based on its breed. Every dog is an individual."

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