Ripe Insurance (Gtr.Manc)

“From providing insurance for your caravan, boat or bike to protecting your livelihood as a Personal Trainer, Musician or small business entrepreneur, our specialist insurance gives you the support you need should the worst happen, leaving you to enjoy doing what you love.” Pretty standard stuff, really, but look closer and Ripe has decided there is money to be made from shooters – especially the type who might need to “have protection should the worst happen”. Like shooting each other perhaps (“in case you injure someone”) or even themselves (“if you’re unfortunate enough to sustain a serious injury whilst out on a shoot”). Gun-waving shooters need to read the small print, though, as Ripe presumably knows its audience and is careful to protect the business from the real idiot shooter as they don’t cover “Bodily injury to any of your employees or members of your immediate family“. Reinforcing the whole ‘wild west’ and amateurs ‘jumping-on-a-bandwagon-they-don’t-understand’ feel we regularly get when we see interactions with the shooting industry, Ripe provides an appallingly basic bird identification page (which they grandiosely call the ‘Ultimate Guide to British Game Birds‘) because (and these are their words remember) “Since we host such a vast array of game bird, it can be easy to forget which is which.” That one sentence shatters the carefully constructed image of ‘knowledge of the countryside’ that the shooting industry wants to sell us: according to Ripe, people who are picking up guns and going out to shoot birds are so ignorant that they need an insurance company’s help to remember which species they’re killing. Shameful…and all underwritten by insurance giant Aviva.