If you’ve never owned live chickens or other poultry, you may not be aware that every year, millions of baby birds are sent through the U.S. postal service. Due to a quirk of bird biology — chicks absorb their egg’s yolk before hatching, providing them with enough nutrients to get by for a little while — they don’t need to eat or drink for up to 48 hours after hatching. This makes the business of sending them in a cardboard box possible.
The practice of shipping chicks through the mail began in 1918 with the promise that chicks would only be shipped if they could reach their destination within 72 hours. That is a promise the USPS can no longer keep.
In the 2025 chick season, 12,000 day-old chicks were left in a USPS truck for three days without food and water. Four thousand of them had died by the time they were discovered. Unfortunately, this incident isn’t an anomaly. In 2020, postal delays in Maine resulted in the deaths of roughly 5,000 chicks. In 2022, 4,000 died after being left on a Miami runway. And these are just a few of the cases that made the news. Every year, winter storms result in mail delays that prove fatal for mailed chicks. On a smaller scale, hobbyists, farmers and farm stores often receive chick orders where one or more have died in transit.
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