The pet insurance industry has made significant progress in moving beyond simple breed-and-age underwriting. The conversation is now rightly turning to behavioural factors, environmental stressors, and the broader context of a dog’s life as meaningful signals of risk.
There is, however, a dimension of that risk picture that has until recently been almost impossible to capture at scale: the physical condition and daily lifestyle of the individual dog in front of you.
That is beginning to change.
When an insurer prices a policy today, they typically know a dog’s breed, age, and declared medical history. What they do not know is whether that dog is carrying excess weight, whether its muscle condition reflects adequate exercise and nutrition, or whether its physical state places it closer to or further from a range of costly health events.
Overweight dogs face elevated risks across conditions that drive high claim frequency and severity. Obesity increases the risk of a cranial cruciate ligament (CCL) rupture by nearly 4 times and quadruples the risk for diabetes mellitus. The metabolic impact is profound: evidence indicates that insulin sensitivity in lean dogs is 58% greater than in overweight dogs. The long-term effects are equally stark. In a lifelong study of Labrador Retrievers, maintaining a lean body condition (BCS 4.6/9) delayed the median onset of radiographic osteoarthritis to 12 years of age, compared to just 6 years for overweight counterparts. Furthermore, clinical data revealed that 64% of dogs diagnosed with collapsing trachea are classified as overweight or obese.
Veterinary professionals have long used Body Condition Scoring (BCS) as a standard clinical tool. The challenge is that it has historically required a trained hand and a consulting room, and has never made its way into underwriting or policyholder engagement, not because it lacked relevance, but because there was no scalable mechanism to capture it.
The Dog API’s visual intelligence product addresses this directly. Using photographs or videos taken by insurers, veterinary practices, or pet owners, the platform produces a validated body-composition score for each dog, without specialist equipment or physical examination.
The implications span the entire policy lifecycle.
At onboarding, body composition data enriches risk profiling in a way that breed alone never can. Two Labradors of the same age may present entirely different risk profiles depending on their physical condition, a distinction that current underwriting frameworks are not equipped to capture, especially given that 59% of Labradors our Vets and we see are overweight or even obese.
During the policy term, periodic scoring gives owners something genuinely valuable: visible, objective evidence that their dog is healthy and thriving. That peace of mind builds loyalty and improves retention, while simultaneously identifying dogs whose condition is deteriorating before it becomes a claim.
At the claims stage, body composition context changes the insurer’s understanding of recovery prognosis, likelihood of recurrence, and long-term exposure.
One distinctive quality of visual intelligence applied to body composition is that it works in both directions. The same imagery that signals risk to an insurer is meaningful feedback for a pet owner.
Most owners have no reliable way to assess whether their dog is at a healthy weight. Weight creep goes largely unnoticed until it has already translated into health consequences.
A University of Liverpool study found that 59% of UK pet dogs were overweight or obese. A separate study published in the NIH found that 85% of owners of overweight dogs failed to recognise it, a misperception that persisted even when owners were given a body condition score chart to guide them.
An insurer that can offer a clear, accessible body condition assessment and connect it to practical guidance on nutrition and activity is providing genuine value rather than simply collecting premiums.
Done well, this shifts the insurer’s role from a payer of claims to a partner in preventing them.
The overlap between body condition risk and high-cost claim categories is well-documented:
The ability to identify this risk at inception, monitor it during the policy term, and engage policyholders before clinical presentation represents a meaningful improvement in loss ratio management, without narrowing coverage or increasing exclusions.
Visual intelligence and lifestyle data do not replace veterinary expertise or underwriting judgment. They inform it, bringing the individual animal’s physical reality and daily context into a process that has too often relied on population-level proxies.
The Dog API exists at exactly this intersection. For insurers seeking to build more accurate, more sustainable products, that capability represents the next meaningful step forward.
As a PEIA member, the Dog API is proud to be part of an alliance that takes a genuinely holistic view of pet health, one that recognises the goal is not simply to reduce losses, but to harness the full potential of the pet health ecosystem and the technical advances within it to improve the lives of animals. PEIA’s role in convening insurers, intermediaries, and technology partners around shared standards and best practices is precisely what allows conversations like this one to move from concept to commercial reality.
Because a more complete picture of the dog in front of you is always better than a more sophisticated model of the average dog.
The Dog API provides visual intelligence, body composition scoring, and canine health data infrastructure for insurers, veterinary practices, and pet health platforms.
Championing Responsible, Transparent, and Compliant Data Sharing in Pet and Equine Insurance.
27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX
VAT number 509422109
Company number 16176404
