Urge U.S. Postal Service and Your U.S. Representative to Ban Shipping Live Birds in the Mail
Action Alert from All-Creatures.org

FROM UPC United Poultry Concerns
October 4, 2020

ACTION

Airmailing baby chicks from factory-farm hatcheries to buyers is cheap, since the birds are shipped like luggage, with no weather protection or other comforts afforded to people’s pets when in transit.

Urge Live Bird Shipping Ban, an alert posted by Social Compassion in Legislation, provides all the information you need to contact the U.S. Postal Service and your U.S. Congressional Representative to urge a ban on shipping live chicks and other animals through the U.S. Postal Service, including by airmail. Currently, two members of Congress have written the Postmaster General criticizing this practice and requesting action. Their letters are included in Urge Live Bird Shipping Ban.

CONTACT:

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

Thad Dilley, Manager of Public Affairs
202-268-2194
[email protected]

Find and contact your United States Congressional Representative

INFORMATION

Chickens and other small animals are shipped from hatcheries and breeders through the U.S. Postal Service by ground delivery and airmail all the time. See, for example, Murray McMurray Hatchery.

Newborn chicks die “quietly” in postal service deliveries, and often a box of chicks will sit in a local Post Office and never be picked up by the buyer. Many self-styled small farms get their “local” chicks entirely through the mail and lobby Congress vigorously to support this practice. Male chicks the hatchery industry calls “packers” are frequently stuffed as packing material in boxes of baby hens.

Shipment of live birds and other animals through the Postal Service is one of the many hidden cruelties inflicted on animals. School-hatching projects, 4-H, cockfighters, hunting-dog trainers, backyard chicken-keepers, “free-range” farmers and other interests view the postal service, in the words of one farmer, as the “very lifeblood” of their business.

NEW INFORMATION - October 13:

The business of shipping live birds, most numerously baby chickens, is huge and lucrative, as described in this recent article in The New York Times, which focuses sympathy on the plight of farmers when the shipments fail, rather than on what the birds are put through in being shipped as cargo, an inhumane practice even when nothing goes “wrong.”

An example of what can go utterly wrong appears in this CNN report on Oct. 8th, which describes how thousands of abandoned baby chicks died this month at the Madrid airport:

There were 26,000 chicks in total, 6,000 of whom had died by the time officers arrived. Those still alive were suffering from hypothermia and trying to survive by eating the remains of their dead neighbors, said police.

The chicks were being transported in cardboard boxes which broke after getting wet in the rain, making their continued shipment "unfeasible," according to police. 

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Thank you for everything you do for animals!

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