20,000 signatures reached
To: UK insurance companies and brokers, including Ladbrook, Access, RSA and Gallagher insurance
Save dog rescues from having to shut up shop - putting thousands of dogs at risk
UK Insurance companies must drop their current plans to stop insuring small charity rescues and those that use foster-carers. This knee-jerk response puts long-standing rescues and thousands of healthy, good natured dogs at risk.
Please take a more common sense, case by case approach.
Why is this important?
The dog rescue sector is already facing a major crisis. Following an explosion of dog ownership during Covid, the return to ‘normality’ has seen a huge increase in the number of dogs coming into the rescue system - with not enough space for them all. It means so many dogs that could go on to have happy lives in new homes don’t get the chance, and instead are being euthanised.
And there's an even bigger crisis looming. Dog rescues need to have insurance cover to operate, but over the past few months more and more insurers have either withdrawn cover for rescues completely - including for long-standing rescue customers - and others have increased their premiums to an unaffordable level or put in restrictions that are unworkable for small charity rescues.
If this trend continues, many smaller rescues will be forced to close leaving even more, healthy, well-adjusted, dogs with no-where to go. As a nation of dog lovers, do we really want to see mass scale euthanisation of dogs because of a set of ‘perfect storm’ factors driven by Covid? The approach being taken by insurers doesn’t penalise those that caused the problems, it just puts dogs and those that work responsibly to save them at risk. Instead of a knee-jerk withdrawal, the insurance industry should work with responsible rescues to promote good practices, ensuring future risk is sensibly managed. Without this the current crisis in the dog world will only get worse.
