Late last month, a heartbreaking incident occurred in the U.S. state of Delaware, where a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) truck carrying around 14,000 chicks was abandoned for three and a half days without food, water, or climate control. As a result, 4,000 chicks perished. The surviving birds which also included some turkeys and quails were transported to the First State Animal Center and SPCA, where workers did their best to find new homes for them as pets.
This incident sheds light on a hidden reality within the poultry industry in America: the live shipment of animals through the mail. Millions of newly hatched chicks are shipped from commercial hatcheries to small farms or backyard poultry keepers. While most chicks survive the journey, many die due to poor transport conditions or delays.
What makes the situation even more tragic is that these incidents are not isolated. In 2020, 4,800 chicks being shipped to farms in Maine died due to postal delays. In 2022, nearly 4,000 chicks died at Miami International Airport due to extreme heat while waiting on the tarmac. These losses are often considered by companies as an “acceptable margin of error” in their economic calculations, treating animals as commodities rather than living beings that feel pain and distress.
The problem doesn't stop with mail shipping. Most chickens raised for meat in the U.S. are transported from factory farms to slaughterhouses under harsh conditions. They are crammed into plastic crates stacked on trucks, enduring journeys in extreme temperatures that lead to thousands dying from stress, suffocation, or even aggression caused by overcrowding.
Official statistics on the number of birds that die during transportation are rare, but estimates suggest that around 0.36% of chickens are considered "dead on arrival" (DOA). This amounts to over 33 million chickens dying annually during transport in the U.S. a number roughly equal to the annual number of cattle slaughtered for beef.
And it’s not just chickens. Pigs and cows also suffer during long-distance transportation, confined in filth and exposed to injuries. Yet U.S. laws offer minimal protection: animals in transit for under 28 hours receive no legal safeguards, and even the Twenty-Eight Hour Law intended to reduce suffering is poorly enforced. It also excludes poultry altogether, which make up the majority of farmed animals.
These events expose a massive food production system that does not prioritize animal welfare. A chick that dies in the mail or a chicken that suffocates in a truck is not seen as a moral loss but merely a number in a company’s balance sheet. This reality raises serious ethical and legal questions and calls for a reevaluation of how we treat the animals raised to feed us.
