Anyone who has been paying attention to the news lately knows that the United States Postal Service (USPS) has recently faced drastic financial cuts, which are causing unprecedented backlogs, delays in delivery, and a high number of reports of lost mail. What fewer people may be aware of is the devastating impact that the USPS crisis is having on the lives of baby chicks, ducklings, and other animals.

Each year, millions of newborn birds are crammed into dark boxes without food or water and sent through the mail on distressing cross-country journeys that take up to 72 hours. Temperature control isn’t a consideration during this cruel method of transport, so the babies are often subjected to extreme heat or cold. It’s not hard to understand why many are dead by the time they reach their destination.

Sadly, this isn’t new: The USPS has been allowing live animals to be sent through the mail since 1918. But with the current Postal Service crisis, there has been a huge spike in the number of chicks that are dying on the journey. In recent weeks, 4,800 baby chicks that were sent through the mail arrived dead to recipients in Maine alone. In other parts of New England, several other farmers have also reported receiving hundreds of dead chicks in the mail.

Meanwhile in California, workers at a large mail-sorting facility in South Los Angeles “…fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “This month, one worker said, she found a box with air holes in a pile of packages. Instead of hearing the gentle sounds of baby chicks, she heard nothing.”

For us, it’s personal: we have many feathered friends at Farm Sanctuary who barely survived this cruel practice. In January 2013, for example, more than 100 chicks mailed from Texas were supposed to arrive in Alabama. But due to an incorrect address, the package traveled nearly a thousand extra miles to Washington, D.C., where it sat unclaimed in the post office. Postal workers finally realized something was wrong and contacted local animal control, who eventually contacted us.

A similar thing happened in July of 2015, when a crowded box of chicks sent from Wisconsin sat in a New York post office unclaimed and ready to be stamped “Return to Sender” (which is standard procedure for an unclaimed package, even one containing live chicks). Fortunately, a compassionate mail worker heard peeping sounds coming from the box and took the chicks home to care for them before contacting us.

Farm Sanctuary has been doing advocacy work around this issue for years. Recently, Farm Sanctuary President and Co-founder Gene Baur wrote a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy urging the U.S. Postal Service to ban shipments of live animals.

We need your help to put the pressure on. If you believe it is wrong for living animals to be mailed like objects, please write to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and urge the U.S. Postal Service to ban shipments of live animals.