If you rent your home, it’s a given that you need to have renters insurance. Most renters insurance claims protect the policyholder from things like liability due to an injury in the home, or theft. Of course, there are things that renters insurance doesn’t cover, including things such as hurricanes or earthquakes.

Over the years, people have tried to claim a number of bizarre occurrences on their renters insurance policy. In some cases, the insurance company actually paid the claim, but in most of these cases the claim was denied. Here are a few of the most bizarre:

1. The zebra attack. One man found out the hard way that the local Zoo security personnel had been laying down on the job. After escaping from the zoo, the zebra wandered two blocks to a rental home. As fate would have it, the back door was unlocked and the house was unoccupied. By the time the renters arrived back home, the zebra had destroyed much of the furniture in the kitchen as it tried to get at a number of cereal boxes in the cabinets.

2. Roaming livestock. There are actually several stories each year in rural areas of livestock, particularly cattle, straying from the farm. They wind up on someone else’s property, sometimes destroying hundreds of dollars worth of landscaping and vegetation.

3. The artistic dog. Painting your living room can be physically and mentally taxing. When you’re done, you can be tempted to leave the cleaning up until another time. One couple in New York discovered, however, that procrastinating has consequences. When the couple awoke the next morning, their dog, a black lab, was yellow, as was

4. Too much laundry detergent. We’ve all seen the cartoons where the small child dumps a full gallon of laundry detergent into the washing machine, and the bubbles spill out and fill the entire room. While it’s not likely that the bubbles would actually fill the room, there have been several claims over the years where floors have been damaged due to washing machine leakage after using too much detergent.

5. Cleaning carpets is murder. One woman in Texas, while she was on trial for the murder of her husband and out on bail, attempted to recover the costs of having her carpets cleaned. Needless to say, once the “guilty” verdict came in, the insurance company refused to pay.