The Home owners insurance question - sorry if this is thread jacking, but I think it is relevant.
A few ways to get coverage, and several ways to pay a claim:
Currently anyone that has replacement cost coverage in their homeowners policy for contents has coverage under contents for animals/trophies. The problems with this.
If you have a large trophy room like some of the pictures I have seen on here, where we are talking 20 + animals, the value of your taxidermy will erode the contents limit significantly. $100,000 contents limit doesn't go very far if you have $50,000 worth of trophies. So you can raise the limit of the contents to accommodate the value of said trophies.
Or, you can schedule the items as if they were fine art; However, many insurance companies are not willing to schedule trophy animals, so one would need to purchase this through a third party carrier.
The way claims are paid:
This is an extremely interesting situation, as I stated on the Taxidermist Business side of the equation. If one is able to schedule the animal with an insurance company, you would be establishing an agreed value. The value of your choosing or from an appraiser agreed upon by you and the insurance company. This would be the best circumstance, but as I stated not all companies are willing to do this.
The second is under the contents coverage of the homeowners policy - most insurance companies are going to try and find a value that will make this situation right for the lost item (s). Each company will handle it differently, and will probably upset more folks than they make happy. It will probably involve some hefty negotiating. (keep in mind that most claims adjusters do not know our field as Sportsman, so most won't have had any exposure to Taxidermy) One of my friends and occassional hunting partners is a property adjuster and he stated that they typically try to find something that would match it as close as possible for valuation. 320 class bull might go for $3000, so they try and set their value based on that. It gets harder to find value for a 190 class sheep, so they might pay closer to $15,000 - $20,000 for something like this depending on what the market place is. This process is much the same as we would use for setting the value on a schedule.
Yelp posted some good links - these will be the items that will help you negotiate assuming the values are to your liking.
Actionshooter posted an interesting scenario where negotiating got someone he know the purchase of another guided hunt to attempt to replace said animals. I am sure this took a lot of negotiating.
This wasn't meant to be a solicitation, but I have been working on this for a few months on my own trophies as well as Firearms limitations and scheduling my guns - I will post in a separate thread as this was started on a Taxidermist question. Feel free to PM me or use my email if you want to ask more specific questions.
Neil
Insurance Peddler Extraordinaire
