Urge the U.S. Postal Service to Stop Shipping Baby Chicks and Other Animals

A baby chick stands on a mailing box before being shipped in Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

In 2020, UPC published an alert to “Urge the U.S. Postal Service to Stop Shipping Baby Chicks and Other Animals to Customers.” Since then, the situation has only gotten worse for the baby birds as “Postal Service delays have become more persistent in the years following the pandemic and a new 10-year plan was put in place by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy aimed at ending losses in the billions of dollars a year.”

The business of shipping live birds, most numerously baby chickens, is huge and lucrative. “A hatchery can make anywhere from a few hundred dollars to more than $1,000 per shipment,” as described in this recent article by NPR in Kansas City, which focuses sympathy on the plight of hatchery owners and farmers when the shipments fail, rather than on what the birds are put through by being shipped as cargo, an inhumane practice even when nothing goes “wrong.”

The current situation highlights what is in fact an ongoing, unsolvable problem. Postal Service shipments of chickens, ducks and other small animals through the mail, including airmail, have been identified for decades with the suffering and death of these animals. Shipping live animals through the Postal Service should be prohibited.

Baby chicks and other small animals shipped through the Postal Service as “perishable matter” frequently go without food and water for two or more days due to transit delays, long hauls and other events unavoidable in the circumstances. They are shipped, not like a dog or a cat whose transit is paid for by a caring owner. Instead they are shipped cheap, like luggage, without proper temperature, ventilation, handling and care for these fragile creatures.

Photo: Courtesy of The Animals Voice

What Can I Do?

Urge the United States Postal Service to stop shipping live birds and other small animals as “perishable matter” to customers. If you are in a different country, contact your own country’s postal service with this appeal. Please educate people about the suffering inflicted on fragile birds and others in being shipped as ground mail and airmail. This is one of the many vital reasons to be vegan.

• Email and call Thad Dilley, Manager of Public Affairs
  202-268-2194, [email protected]

  Sample message to Mr. Dilley:

  Dear Mr. Dilley,

  I'm writing today to urge the USPS to end all live animal shipments immediately. Animals suffer from extreme temperatures and lack of food and water at best, and they die a slow, agonizing death at worst. The USPS should not be in the business of shipping baby chicks or any live animals as mail.

  Please stop the suffering and end live animal shipments!

  Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to your response.

  [YOUR NAME & ADDRESS]

• Write directly to the Postmaster General:

  The Honorable Louis DeJoy
  Postmaster General
  United States Postal Service
  475 L’Enfant Plaza West, SW
  Washington, DC 20260