800 Baby Chicks Died in a Box After Being Shipped Through the Mail
Where were they headed?
A news story about chicks dying in transit after being shipped through USPS caught my eye. It’s rare to see the non-vegans I follow on Twitter mention animal cruelty, but a few of them were talking about how sad this is, and when I looked at the replies and retweets I read hundreds of people expressing anger and sadness. It was also framed as an example of Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise voters by cutting costs and overhauling structures at the United States Postal Service.
While this story is extremely sad, I’m confused by the reaction.
These chicks were being shipped by a meat farmer, Pauline Henderson of Pine Tree Poultry, who, as the headline points out, is out thousands of dollars because she wasn’t able to kill the chicks herself and turn their bodies into profit. She ships chicks through the mail every month, and she explains in the article that that usually only 1–2% die in transit. So in this case, it would have typically been 8–16 dead chicks in the mix rather than 800.
