Mail Order Chicks

Many people are surprised to hear that baby chicks can be delivered by the US Postal Service.  In fact, the USPS has been transporting live day-old chicks since 1918 and most people had no idea. That is until the spring of 2021 when low staff and severe weather teamed up to create some tragedies.  

The idea of these baby animals being shipped in a box was highly disturbing to me – everything I read about raising the chicks promoted the idea that these fragile, sensitive creatures needed me  to care for them in a state of the art brooder set up.  So how on earth were they going to survive a potentially three-day trip in the mail?

Reality – for the first four days, chicks are somewhat self-sufficient. The penultimate stage of hatching is absorbing the remaining yolk from the egg. This provides the hydration and nutrition these guys need for up to 4 days (which is why there is a requirement that they hatched no more than 24 hours prior to shipping). Temperature regulation is the remaining issue, so breeders  require a minimum number of chicks per order to ship the chicks (so they can cuddle up – which they do even if they aren’t in the mail). 

Now, to be clear, the box of chicks does not end up in your mailbox  – so PETA’s characterization that chicks are treated like junk mail is not accurate. On the contrary, every expectant farmer that I know wakes up early on Chick Day to wait for that 6 am phone call from the post office to announce the arrival of their newest livestock. Some expectant farmers obsessively track their packages online and some may have even called distribution centers and harassed postal employees when the package didn’t seem to be progressing… 

When the chicks arrive at the local post office they are picked up in person by the recipient. That was actually my favorite part of this (otherwise stressful) process – the people at the post office seemed as excited as we were! The Dreamy One, the Literal One and I loaded ourselves into the car with bedhead hair, unbrushed teeth and a  cup of scalding hot coffee to rush to the post office. We squealed with delight at the sweet sounds coming from the box that confirmed that chicks can, in fact, survive being mailed. 

We had no chick casualties in the shipping process (we actually ordered birds the next spring too – all arrived alive), but I still hated the idea of them being in transit and that the USPS offers no guarantee on delivery time. Other commercial carriers that might offer a guarantee or allow people to pay for special treatment of their babies are not allowed to ship chicks because they utilize cargo planes – USPS chicks are transported by ground or on passenger flights. Since our society seems to accept our need to subject pets to the stress of automobile travel and passenger flights, I guess that makes sense…

Some groups are pushing to stop the shipment of chicks altogether – and I understand why – but also, I can see the farmers’ side. Diversity in livestock breeds has value just like it does in other animal species – and people want specific breeds for specific reasons. 

My Jersey Giant breeder is several states away – she would not be able to make a living if she could only sell chicks to people willing to drive to her to pick them up. So my take is that we need to make sure we don’t pass some knee jerk legislation that appeases the feelings of someone who just read a news story about dead chicks in a backlogged post office, but won’t be affected in any way by the restrictions. However, I think it’s probably time to collect a group of farmers, breeders and shipping experts to reexamine how we transport chicks – a lot has changed since 1918.