Dear David Steiner, 

As the incoming Postmaster General, you will soon be in a position to implement a critically needed change at the United States Postal Service (USPS). I am writing to urge you to end the shipping of live animals, including day-old birds, through our nation’s mail.

In May, more than 4,000 young birds were found dead after being mailed to the wrong destination, among as many as 12,000 animals in total. Upon arrival at a Delaware USPS distribution center, the birds were left in cardboard boxes for three days without food, water, or adequate ventilation, and local animal rescuers have since been scrambling to find homes for the surviving birds. 

This tragic incident was entirely preventable and is not an isolated case. The USPS has been shipping birds as young as one day old since 1918, serving a lucrative industry. Several of the nation’s largest hatcheries ship through the mail, including Murray McMurray Hatchery, which reports doing 99 percent of its business through mail orders. Hoover’s Hatchery sends animals to Tractor Supply, a chain of stores that sold 11 million chickens in 2023. 

Freedom Ranger Hatchery, from which the birds who wound up in Delaware were sent, requires a minimum of 15 day-old birds per order, and seems to operate on the assumption that some will not survive mailing. Because “nature can take its course during travel,” they add 2 percent more birds to each order. “Then you’re more likely to receive the number of healthy birds you’re counting on.”

While these companies profit, animals suffer. The USPS states that day-old birds can survive being shipped without food or water for up to 72 days. The problem is that the animals’ survival is at the mercy of many factors: proper packaging, weather fluctuations, and increasingly, shipping delays.

Farmers, store owners, and other recipients of chicks sent through the mail have reported that delayed deliveries have led to more animals dying en route. Sadly, this will likely continue, with USPS operations plagued by slowdowns.

Furthermore, the full scale of this problem will remain hard to determine without more transparency. Many more animals are likely dying than those reported in the media, and the USPS does not report the number of live animals it ships annually or how many die within its system.

At Farm Sanctuary, we have seen birds suffer the impacts of live mailing. In 2013, more than 100 birds were shipped from Texas to Alabama, but traveled nearly 1,000 extra miles and arrived in Washington, DC, where local animal control alerted Farm Sanctuary. Just two years later, a box containing 15 chicks was about to be stamped “return to sender” until a postal worker heard their peeps and helped to find them a home with us.

The public, too, is put at risk by sending animals through the nation’s mail. Around three of every four emerging diseases are zoonotic in nature, able to transmit between animals and humans. Five years after the world faced a zoonotic COVID-19 pandemic, bird flu is proliferating in animal agriculture, and transport has exacerbated its spread from farm to farm across the nation. Shipping live animals via the USPS presents an unnecessary and dangerous risk to public health.

While other mail carriers ship live animals, the USPS, as a government agency, has the chance and responsibility to set the standard. I hope you will take action to prevent needless suffering and reduce the risk of spreading zoonotic disease by ending the shipping of live animals through our country’s postal service.