Mail-order chicks are arriving dead, costing Maine farmers thousands of dollars | Hacker News Reader

Mail-order chicks are arriving dead, costing Maine farmers thousands of dollars

pressherald.com

48 pointsdanso58 comments

I am from SE Asia and postal system is non-existent to most people in my native country. Last time I sent anyone a letter was to my grandfather 30 years ago.

I came to the US 5 years back, and I still marvel at how crucial USPS is to the growth of tech and economy here. You see, back in my country an entrepreneur would have to tackle the last-mile delivery problem using their own fleet. Only in last 2-3 years ride-sharing service has become commonplace in major metropolis and as a result facebook-based housewife-run boutique shop businesses have boomed. But here in the US, you could always stick an address on a parcel and forget about it.

From the article:

Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said Wednesday. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.

The wrongness of what's happening here is not just that the Post Office is experiencing unusual delays. Even the normal state of affairs shows a grotesque indifference to life.

I’m not sure you have all the information necessary to make that statement so broadly.

This process of shipping poultry has developed and been perfected over many decades. Everything is carefully measured so that the birds are born in waves and will get to their destination on a set schedule. This is done absolutely with their well-being in mind, Ie: the packaging, the chemical heat, the amount of time so as to make sure they can get to sufficient food and water, etc. Many hatcheries will only ship in large quantities too because they’ve found they can keep the birds safer in that packaging vs what’s used for small batches.

We researched our options and found that had we used a “local” hatchery, it would not have been any better experience for the birds than shipping through the mail.

This is not to say that there aren’t serious issues in the broader poultry industry, but to say that hatcheries are acting with a “grotesque indifference to life” is an overly broad statement not in line with the actual practices at play.

I'd say a 2% mortality rate to ship chicks is unacceptable. We've practically shut down the entire world economy because of a 0.5-2% mortality rate from Covid-19.

It's a symptom of a bigger issue. These hatcheries even under the best of circumstances are creating lives that will be hard and short just to turn a profit.

Do you throw away 2% of the food you buy?

Real life has predators and infant mortality too. Should i feel bad about keeping predators as pets and seeing them hunting bunnies in the yard? I don’t.

The state of affairs where people find grotesque ordinary life occurrences because they are so separated is troubling.

Reminds me of a Stanislav Lem book where after removing aggression/violence from humans society moves onto other animals. No more predators.

You do know that for every chicken you eat a male chick was pulverized to death, right? (in the US, some countries prefer suffocation).

Yes, I am very well aware of this. Which is why I don't eat chickens, other animals, or consume any other livestock product.

But every once in a while I forget the fractal nature of the horrors we inflict on any animal that is unlucky enough to get caught up in our agricultural industry.

"Caught up" is a good way to put it. Imagine what this does to bird nests: https://cdn.agriland.ie/uploads/2015/03/Harvesting_winter_wh...

The macerator is preferable. They are pulped faster than a nerve impulse can send a pain signal.

The male chick's death was planned for. These weren't.

I’d been expecting articles like this to pop up soon. USPS has long been known for its efficiency in moving poultry around the country. All our birds arrived by mail as day-old chicks and like the article indicated, it isn’t uncommon to move hundreds at a time with very limited loss. That said - it’s only possible to make this work because the USPS has had a functioning, effective system for decades, where birds are born Monday and typically to their destination somewhere in the country no later than wednesday. The boxes have a chemical warmer and the birds have just enough food in their tummies to make it across the country. When I started hearing about these delays, I knew this would be a problem as their little lives are on a time-sensitive system that works because everyone from the hatchery to the receiving farmer understands the criticality.

USPS regulations for day-old poultry: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

Why is it even allowed to mail animals at all? I would have expected a specialised service for that.

The post office actually transports quite a few kinds of live animals. It seems like it makes sense, since it's a very useful service for some kinds of farming, and there's not much incentive for some specialized service to deliver live animals to the middle of nowhere for a reasonable cost, whereas the postal service has most of the infrastructure in place already.

https://www.ups.com/us/en/help-center/packaging-and-supplies...

You can probably get set up with a special division of UPS or FedEx if you want to use them.

There is probably a 9 week signup process with 6-7 reps that only do business by phone, and it probably costs 30X as much as USPS. These are not meant to be exaggeration at all, and are probably accurate IME dealing with far more common shipping needs.

This has apparently been a service since 1918. It appears in some circumstances (for medical research or making antivenin) you can also ship live scorpions[1]!.

[1]: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm#ep184083

People used to mail children through the postal service: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-chil...

Lol, I hope the mortality rate were lower than the 2% for birds.

I'm curious how they protect the chicks in the mail during shipping when the temperature has been in the low-mid 90s the past few weeks in PA. Even in Maine it hit 90.

Chicks are ideally at 90F for the first few weeks of life. When weather is cooler, they put chemical heat bags in the shipping boxes. I’ve never experienced it, but I’m told that during particularly hot times the hatcheries also use cool packs instead. Point being, they are trying their best to equalize the temps and get those birds to their destination as fast as possible.

Heat is generally the bigger issue - birds that are a few weeks along have a greater problems when it’s too hot out. If it is cold, they will pack together and keep each other warm - it’s actually quite happy to see, as at least with my birds they seem to put aside their issues and look out for each other when they get cold.

Like the article says it’s worked perfectly for a very long time. Having it be too warm is probably much safer than a little cold (our chicks would gather directly under the heat lamp and I wondered why it never bothered them). The problem here is probably dehydration from having shipments intentionally delayed.

I agree - dehydration / starvation is the primary issue here, followed by the risks of simply more moving and shaking.

different species have different temperatures and tolerances, chickens seem to have a body temperature something like 5-10 F warmer than humans which helps, what feels hot or cold to you doesn’t seem the same for another animal

Birds today, your medication tomorrow. The USPS provides a public good well beyond its cost.

Other things of commercial significance that you can mail: bees.[1]

https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

The long tail of business that's transacted on the assumption that the USPS is a reliable, cost-effective business is absolutely massive.

I honestly can't believe it's being dismantled in this manner for purely short-term partisan goals by an ostensibly "pro-business" political party.

> USPS is a reliable, cost-effective business

I'd even rephrase that to say, USPS is a reliable, cost-effective service, because I think it's important enough that it doesn't need to be considered a "business"--and assumed to have a chance at generating profit.

100% agree on your correction.

It is a foundational utility of a developed country, and our folly is not defending it as such (as you would for water, power, schools, fire services, etc).

> I honestly can't believe it's being dismantled

I think your news is about a day old. USPS backed off any changes until later:

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/18/usps-postmas...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/08/18/politics/post-office-dejo...

That was yesterday. USPS was caught today continuing to dismantle sorting machines.

https://twitter.com/_HeatherWalker/status/129610953616467968...

https://twitter.com/_HeatherWalker/status/129612204377213338...

https://twitter.com/_HeatherWalker/status/129615356967935590...

That doesn't bring back online all the mail sorting machines that have already been dismantled (and in some cases left outside in the rain).

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/08/dismantled-equipment-...

They’ve already removed hundreds of sorting machines, thousands of blue boxes, removed almost all overtime and a host of other things. Sure they “stopped” but those things aren’t coming back. Damage done.

Eh I've heard no where near those numbers, do you have a source for that?

The original reduction plan as detailed in a presentation from May called for nearly 1,000 sorting machines to be dismantled. It's hard to say how much of that plan has been completed (we'll likely find out more next Monday during the Congressional hearings) but it's absolutely that order of magnitude.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7035434-USPS-Equipme...

Temporarily suspending the dismantling does not retro actively fix the damage done to date. The USPS has been under attack by forces that want to privatize postal delivery for many years.

Additionally today it was made clear that the current USPS head will not fix what he just broke, just pause the breaking until after the election

This is, or will be seen in retrospect, to be fabrication, unreflective of reality.

Perspectives like these around Trump are Charlie Brown with the football.

The pattern throughout his career is to go too far, claim ignorance and stop, wait for the next news cycle, and continue.

That he was caught just means there wasn't enough distraction, so the noise and bluster will be turned up when it starts again.

Best wishes.

> I honestly can't believe it's being dismantled in this manner for purely short-term partisan goals by an ostensibly "pro-business" political party.

Well, it's not? This has been a long time coming. [1]

[1]: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/electionacademy/2015/09/01/its-...

I can believe it. How can you not after the past 3.5 years of constant lies and abuse of government power which was also supported by nearly half the country.

It isn't being done by a political party for partisan goals, though there are certainly innumerable willing and willfully blind accomplishes in the party infrastructure.

It is being done by a criminal leadership, as part of ordinary practice. It's really, really important to make that distinction.

Across the US government, infrastructure is being dismantled. That is what criminal organizations do. These are the spoils of war.

It is not inside the system. It is outside the system, destroying it.

That people believe this is a legitimate, though twisted, partisan enterprise...is part of the fun of the criminal act.

It is happening, out in the open, by sociopaths.

> It isn't being done by a political party for partisan goals, though there are certainly innumerable willing and willfully blind accomplishes in the party infrastructure.

Yes it is; dismantling the public post has been a Republican partisan goal for more than half a century, it's why we have the USPS instead of the US Post Office, it's why the USPS when it didn't fail quickly enough was saddled with unique pre-funding requirements for retiree health benefits, and it's why the members of the Republican Party that don't have direct buy in to the additional corrupt motivations of the present administration are standing by while it happens. The same is true of similar, more -immediately-corrupt-than-the-broader-partisan-motive efforts elsewhere in this administration that leverage long-standing Republican partisan interests.

> It is being done by a criminal leadership, as part of ordinary practice.

That's also true, but it's not either/or.

it is the political party, though. If it were an isolated gang of criminals then you would expect the political party to vote to remove, distance themselves, scowl at them, anything. With extremely few, vanishingly few exceptions, they are not.

Don't downvote. Valid distinction, factual reporting.

I shouldn't be a surprise, the Republican party created the EPA under Nixon for good reasons, and now does everything it can to undermine it.

USPS is unreliable because it is partisan. Observe:

https://twitter.com/SheriffTNehls/status/1276646406682484736

It's a postal worker caught on video throwing campaign materials in the trash. She drove to a storage rental place to do it, evidently thinking that that was safer than disposing of the materials at her workplace.

With postal workers like that, it is nuts to think that ballots will be safe. If a neighborhood seems to vote in a way that the postal workers don't like, the ballots will be much more likely to go missing.

So the solution to the possibility of ballots not being delivered, is to increase the likelihood that ballots will not be delivered?

If the anecdote you linked were the driving concern, then addressing that concern would result in constructive action instead of sabotage.

At some point, probably when it's too late, people will realize that Trump appointing people who intentionally destroy the agencies they oversee was an intentional plan to destabilize the government.

This is not surprising nor recent. American politicians have been trying to dismantle the government for decades; almost immediately after the New Deal era.

See also: regulatory capture, gerrymandering, campaign financing, etc.

Who thought it was a good idea to 'mail' live animals? Seems like a rather harsh thing to do... especially when it's done using a process that doesn't care about what it is mailing. (regardless of who is influencing that process)

This is a normal, regulated, and common use of the USPS.

Seems rather absurd to put a live animal in a box and put it in a process that is designed for moving non-living man-made objects around. The only time I've heard about animals shipping via a postal service was illegal imports of birds (tied up and put in tubes).

That's an inaccurate statement. The shipment of live animals via USPS is a specific service documented in detail at https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

These include bees, day–old poultry, adult birds, and small, harmless, cold–blooded animals.

At one time, USPS was used to mail children. [0]

[0]: https://www.history.com/news/mailing-children-post-office

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-chil...

> Who thought it was a good idea to 'mail' live animals?

The USPS: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

And it's been used for this (well, technically, it was the US Post Office, when it started, not the US Postal Service) for more than a century.

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