Urge U.S. Postal Service & Your U.S. Representative to Ban Shipping Live Birds in the Mail

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.

Brief Background:

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.

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.

To 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

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Wayne Creed

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