To cancel insurance or not?

[user1497787065]

My dog is now in his 15th year and we have been very lucky to have only claimed for one X-ray during his lifetime. We have made the decision not to put him through any scans, tests etc as he ages. For the most part he is well. We still
manage a short walk each day and he eats well. He has a couple of fatty lumps, a cutaneous horn and a few small lumps/large spots and a cough for which he takes 1/2 steroid pill each day.
Although we know we won’t put him through anything intrusive I’m just wondering whether to cancel his insurance or not? I just worry that I’ve paid it for all these years then I cancel it and he does something like hurt a leg or something? £70 per month saved sounds good though.

Would l it be worth taking him to the vet for an MOT (for want of a better word) to have a really clear view on his health and prospects before cancelling. Then if you do cancel put the money aside in a savings account so that it’s there if you need it for the fella?

He has had a bit of an MOT when he had his booster just before Christmas and the only things picked up were what I mentioned in my post.

i think I will probably just continue paying just in case……

It’s all well and good saying you wouldn’t put him through tests etc but could you pay for routine things that could happen like a torn cruciate ?

The worst thing would be something happening/developing and suddenly having to scrabble to find the money I think. Difficultly on top of worry. Plus leg breaks do need X-rays (said the person who had to have one today - although not for my leg!) Here’s to many more happy years for you and your doggo.

If you know lovely dog is towards the end why not wait for £70 a month?

I stopped insuring my dogs years ago. With one he did have mast cell cancer but stage one so £1200 sorted it - he was 13 and insurance over the years would have been much more.
But as you have continued, I’ll tell you about my last dog. She was slowing down and deaf at 14, bit of arthritis but seemed ok. Then she quite quickly went off her food, lost weight and her breathing became laboured. So we went to the vets. Now I suppose we could have just said put her to sleep, but it could have just been a chest infection/cold that could have been resolved. They kept her and said they’d do a blood test, and also scan her to see if there was an obstruction. Now they were very up front about the costs of these tests, but I felt I couldn’t just abandon her without investigating. As it happened she crashed and died that night, and they had found lumps on her liver and fluid in her lungs. They would have done further tests (costing about £2000), if she hadn’t gone into crisis. Then we would have discussed what further treatment, and if they thought it was worthwhile. At her age probably not. The upshot is that it cost £1400 in the end, for them to basically tell me she was dying. Would you do the same for your dog if he took a turn for the worse? Or decide to put him down without trying to find out if there was some treatment?
If the former, keep up the insurance. Of course there is the possibility that your dog will one day just pass away in his sleep, but I’ve never known a dog to do that without having had some indication that something was wrong and the owner trying to figure out what.

OP’s dog is 15 - the likelihood of him managing a cruciate surgery and all the necessary recovery is tiny.

OP personally I wouldn’t insure such an old dog. It’s an amazing age and putting them through endless tests and treatment to extend their life by essentially weeks or months seems very unfair to me.

We stopped insuring our old dog, who sounds to have been in similar circumstances. However he had a couple of things listed as pre-existing which meant no help for anything to do with his legs, and our vets was a charity/community interest type which meant no consultation fees. It’s a risk either way, but I think at 15 it’s unlikely you would put them through significant surgery? In which case the insurance isn’t as necessary.

Personally I wouldn’t stop. If you think about it every visit to the vet is around £70 just as soon as you’ve walked in the door, dog or cat.
I haven’t had insurance, and now my dogs is 12 and I worry over every vets visit because it has got just so expensive.
When the time comes and I get my next dog, I am going all in for some top level pet insurance these days you just can’t afford not to.

£70 a month is a lot of money based on “what if”

my dog isn’t insured, she’s nearly 2.

reason being is that there’re so many clauses in pet insurance that many owners find out they aren’t covered when they need to claim on it and they’ve been paying out every month.

if you take your pet to the vet with a concern about something, even if no treatment was needed it goes down as a pre existing condition.

I take my chances and will just pay out if it’s ever needed.

plus many vets do payment plans now

OP's dog is 15. Before she gets any money back from her insurance, she'll need to pay her excess and probably 20% of all treatment on top. Plus, the likelihood of a 15yo dog being a candidate for any major treatment is slim.

I was considering this with an older dog and then she had an emergency at a weekend. When you have blood pouring out your dog you’re going to the emergency vet. The bill was thousands but she’s fine now. Op if you were in that situation could you pay or would you have to pts which would probably still cost £500 at a weekend. If you had to pts over something easily fixable would you be upset? I get the thing of not putting an elderly dog through surgery but mine didn’t need surgery. Just meds and a hospital admission.

We don’t know what type of dog this is , my sister had a border x that wasn’t on the face of it the fittest dog on the planet and she had quite a major operation at 18 and was back to her ‘normal’ pretty quickly .

That's not the norm by any means, though and OP has already decided she wouldn't put her dog through any major tests and scans, so surgery is unlikely to even be on the cards.

Thank you for all your responses which are as
mixed as my thoughts. I know £70 a month is a lot, as I said, ‘just in case’ but think we will continue paying for a little longer, perhaps until we see real decline in him.

Something to consider is on-going medication - librela for example for arthritis is about £120 every month. I have an old dog but break even on my insurance just on repeat medications and the occassional blood test.

As my dog got older, there were more restrictions on what we could claim from the insurance, repeat medication being one of them. It might be cheaper to sign up to your vet's monthly payment plan. Near the end, I had both as it saved the excess for every consultation and helped us manage end of life care knowing we could take him in to see the vet without an additional charge each time.

Over 29 years and six dogs, we have only ever self-insured. Most expensive procedure so far was £1800 removal of a claw with a tumour under it.

We do live away from very busy roads and don’t have dogs with, for example, cruciate ligament issues.

I didn't insure my 2 dogs. I've had them for almost 7 years and apart from annual injections and flea and worming tablets they have never needed a vet. I put away £80 per dog into a separate bank account for their care. It's currently got over £14.8k sitting there as it's accrued interest over the years too. I made the decision after a friend's dog was ill and her insurance refused to pay out as 4 years earlier the dog had a similar issue that was completely resolved and they said it was a pre-existing condition.

Name changed for this because I can be quite chatty on here and don’t want any of my DH clients to recognise our lives - zillion to one things do happen!)

My DH is a vet, specialised in small animal surgery. We don’t insure our cats because if he can’t do the op then we wouldn’t want them to have the op. (We would insure if we didn’t have a vet in the house). We do insure our dogs. Just in case. There are not many invasive surgeries we would have done on our dogs and we would never do anything like chemo, especially as they age…. But…for example, if they’re knocked down or something, their life could be saved and restored but it would be costly.

That’s the nature of insurance. For houses and cars we hope to never use it but for pets, I guess it’s newer, people feel shortchanged if they haven’t had to use it. It’s great your dog has had such a lovely long and healthy life.