If someone I knew claimed that eBay execs were sending them things like this I wouldn’t believe them. It’s like something from a TV show.
Even in the most generous interpretations of the saying, this is a uniquely extraordinary exception to it.
The question isn't "can you send live animals" the question is "what happens if I sent a live/dead animal and _don't_ tell USPS". That question is not answered by the section (?) 526 rules [1].
> The following factors are applied to all shipments of mailable live or dead animals:
> … Protection of the mail and the environment against the following: … Obnoxious odors and noise.
> ...protection of animal specimens against spoilage
https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_003.htm
There's some other restrictions on mailing dead wild animals, but mailing livestock carcasses is not restricted from what I can see outside of those broad guidelines.
Few better ways to spoil a pathologist's morning than a package with a blood stain in one corner.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/25-years-ago-in-virginia-a-very...
Lets do a different example. Lets say I go to checkout at a grocery store and I ring up a bar of soap as a bag of ice. Obviously this is wrong. Nobody is debating you can buy soap at the store but to claim it is ice is wrong.
Back to USPS. Nobody is claiming you can't send live animals. The question is what happens when you send a live animal and don't claim it.
There's no need to declare anything in that case. Might need to declare the preservation chemicals, but nothing about the actual dead animal.
(over the years, I've come to enjoy snail-quariums a lot. They outlive all the fish and keep the walls clean of algae)
Wonder no more: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm
(I've mailed bee nucs to my local post office, it's usually uneventful, once a newer employee was a little nervous having it around)
This is some weird 1950's mob loan shark tactics.
How long have you hung around with sales and marketing folks?
Most of them are reasonable, but in a role where you rapidly switch companies and are comped heavily on closed sales... the outliers are really out there.
Anyone who has had weird stuff happening to them like finding a GPS tracker on their car among other weird stuff would end up going down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole about 'targeted individuals' or similar. It is extremely distressing.