Hello everyone, hope you and your furry friends are all doing well. Today I want to talk about my own experience with pet insurance. By no means am I an expert on this subject however we do have our two rabbits insured as well as our dog Artie. We have had to make two claims on our insurance previously for Bertie who is a mini lop rabbit, so I just wanted to share with you my experience in doing this.
First things first, why get pet insurance? Ok so that question is fairly easy to answer; if anything bad happens to your pet and they need expensive vet care then you are able to provide it without it costing you thousands of pounds in one lump sum. But that being said as with everything there are good and bad pet insurers.
When getting pet insurance for rabbits you must make sure that dental care is covered. Teeth can be very problematic in some rabbits due to the fact that they never stop growing. Because of this, most pet insurers will not cover dental care for rabbits. When we were looking for pet insurance for our rabbits around 3 years ago, we found that only two insurance companies would cover dental care, they were PetPlan and Agria Pet Insurance. In the end we chose Agria, I don’t think there was much difference between the two, but I think at the time Agria were slightly less expensive.
You also want to make sure that it is a lifetime policy that you get, not all pet insurance companies offer this so make sure that yours does. A lifetime policy means that if your pet develops a lifelong illness such as arthritis then your pet will be covered for its entire life. Some policies won’t pay out for reoccurring problems or claims for the same injury. All of our pets are on lifetime policies, which has been very handy as twice in the last two years Bertie has became poorly with GI Stasis (For more on GI Stasis click here).
The first time when Bertie became poorly he was taken to our regular vets at around 5pm as we noticed he was not himself, he was then diagnosed with GI Stasis but because our vets is not an overnight vets he then had to be moved to a 24 hour vets. In the morning he was then taken back to our vets when they had opened. Fortunately, Bert recovered as we had managed to spot the signs early which is critical with any problem in rabbits.
Because we had to use the overnight vets for him this then meant that we had to submit two separate claims and unfortunately this then meant there was two lots of admin fees to pay, although we did only have to pay one lot of excess. Earlier this year Bertie had the same issue and again because we had spotted the signs early, he made a full recovery. This time we had to use the out of hours vets again as it was early in the morning that we spotted he wasn’t well, after spending time there he then went over to our vets once they had opened and spent the day there before coming home in the evening. He was then cared for by ourselves for the next 48 hours where we were having to give him medicine every couple of hours. Again, we had to submit two separate claims but again Agria reimbursed us minus the excess and admin fee.
Without having insurance, we would be thousands down on vet fees. You do have to consider whether it is worthwhile making a claim though because of the excess and admin fees involved, on both occasions for us the vet bills have been far greater than the fees. We’ve never had any issues with the claims that we have made and they have both been promptly paid out. I would love to hear about everyone else’s experience with pet insurance. Please note that I am in no way promoting any pet insurance companies and I am only sharing my own personal experiences. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll check out our next blog where I am going to talk about the importance of having a rabbit savvy vet.
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