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Safari Specialty Importers Safeguards Your Trophies

Safari Specialty Importers Safeguards Your Trophies

Taxidermy is an integral part of many a hunter’s memory preservation. A memento of a momentous experience. But why is it that so many hunters leave the disposition of their trophies to chance?

You’ve spent a bundle on your dream hunt. Saved your nickels and dimes for years, made all of the arrangements, filled out piles of paperwork for the hunt of a lifetime. You’ve even saved your pennies for taxidermy—you’ve got to preserve those memories with taxidermy. However, you fell just short of doing all that you could to make sure your hard-earned trophies actually make it through your front door. If you pay attention to the narratives spun by international hunters, you will unfortunately not infrequently hear horror stories about trophies lost in transit, trophies switched with lesser specimens, exorbitant shipping costs that catch you by surprise, etc. What can be done to avoid such a story associated with your dream hunt? Glad you asked. Allow me to introduce you to Robert and Rosella Quartarone, owners of Safari Specialty Importers. Robert and Rosella have spent the better part of a decade ensuring that just such stories are not associated with your hunt. Safari Specialty Importers specializes in handling trophies. The Quartarones are known as foremost experts in the hunting industry and are ready to oversee your trophy handling needs.

There is a process that should be followed from the moment your animal takes its last breath to the moment it leaves the continent. This is the hunter’s responsibility, but if you are a first-timer, you may not know what to do, and you may fall victim to your own ignorance. Proper planning can help you avoid making critical errors. Safari Specialty Importers will take control of the entire process at your behest, reviewing export documents for U.S. entry compliance. Think of it as Trophy Command Central, taking the burden of concern off your list. This is a value-added service that reduces your responsibility to merely making the necessary payments.

Working out of seven major U.S. ports, the company’s goal is to bring trophies closer to their final destinations, lowering final inland transportation costs significantly. Speaking of shipping, another stated goal is to streamline the shipping process by eliminating redundancies or multiple unnecessary transportation costs. Safari Specialty Importers consolidates shipping, spreading the shipping charges to a group of hunters rather than to an individual. This saves on shipping costs dramatically. An oft repeated complaint is that shipping trophies sometimes costs more than the actual taxidermy.

Airport storage facilities can charge as much as $100 per day whereas Safari Specialty Importers only uses its customs-bonded and USDA-approved warehousing that costs only $45 per day. In proactively pushing the process through by working with government agents, your trophies will spend much less time lingering in a warehouse or airport, incurring charges. There is a definite method to the madness.

Also important to note, Safari Specialty Importers has been commissioned to recover missing trophies, a service one would rather avoid needing, but one that is a part of its capable toolkit.

A couple of days prior to your departure, Safari Specialty Importers will send an email to the outfitter, dip-and-packer, taxidermist, shipper, etc., introducing the company as the single point of contact moving forward, providing the correct legal information required as a means of preventing errors in paperwork—and taking the whole process out of your hands. Think of it as a preemptive strike, and one less thing to have to address yourself.

If that isn’t enough, owners Robert and Rosella Quartarone are real Second Amendment advocates, actively involved in the NRA and its mission to preserve your Second Amendment rights and active in the NRA Hunters’ Leadership Forum. They are not merely brokers, but hunters who share your same concerns. Much like using a “meet and greet” service to ensure that the process of temporarily importing your firearms into a foreign destination goes smoothly, commissioning the Quartarone to ensure the safe and legal passage of your trophies to your home just makes good sense. Wouldn’t it be nice not having a reason to complain?

Editor’s Note: Friends Robert and Rosella Quartarone and the entire team at Safari Specialty Importers, Inc., have nearly 20 years of specialized experience in clearing clients’ sport-hunted trophies through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Customs. Their overseas team members include outfitters, taxidermists, shippers and members of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and the Professional Hunter’s Association of South Africa (PHASA), to name a few. The Quartarones have established a network that brings together different areas of expertise, all operating as a unit under their guidance, to navigate the intricacies of importing and exporting trophies from countries worldwide. For more information, visit importinghuntedtrophies.com.