I bred, raised, sold and showed Chinese Silkie Bantam chickens for over 20 years (one of my strange and diverse adventures in life). The "fancy" hadn't been polluted with that "balls to the wall, color of the month club, cross breeding garbage, $1000 chicken" mentality and shipping eggs, chicks, juveniles, and adult birds was still a novelty for most Post Offices. You could send everything next day air and be guaranteed it would get to where it was going in 48 hours. Most shippers knew where the "hubs" where from point A to B,
insurance wasn't too much, we all purchased special "live animal" shipping boxes in bulk, and we tracked shipments coming and going........life was GOOD!
1995-2000, enter
big investors, USDA, NAIS, and PETA. And the USPS handlers picked and chose which guidelines they were going to go with, and some employees even took it upon themselves to return boxes when they hit the loading docks before being put on a flight,
BECAUSE OF THEIR PERSONAL BELIEFS. Putting on a label that said "Hatching Eggs" or "Live Embryos" dropped your chances of an intact box getting to the buyer by 50%. USPS didn't send out memos that stated the weather (usually heat) restricted or closed any hub for receiving live birds, and many times the animals got lost at the transfer points and showed up 4 or 5 days later back at the shippers, dead or half dead.
I received a few packages containing birds, that look like someone had played football with their box, eggs double boxed with 2 inches of Styrofoam surrounding the inner box that had scramble goo dripping out of it. One customer I sent emu eggs to had to go to a Naval Base to pick up a destroyed box because Haz Mat had been called to the Post Office for a suspicious leaking package.......
I'd go Fed Ex, UPS any day, if they took live animals or their rates had been low enough to send eggs, but it wasn't a choice. The one thing I had going for me was I have no home delivery in this po dunk "town" which is basically a zip code, a post office and 2 gas stations, ALL packages had to be picked up at the post office, so if anything got lost, it was all on USPS.
Between the recession, wondering what hair brained BS PETA was going to pull, whether NAIS was going to be extended with the Patriot Act, again, and the ever increasing costs and growing ineptness of USPS, I called it quits. I have a large menagerie of "lawn ornaments" now, I might turn on my cabinet incubator if someone wants some chicks, cygnets, peafowl or whatever and will drive here to pick up, but the head aches and the return on what I had spent years developing isn't worth the hassle with USPS (or the Gov or special interest groups).
USPS is what it is. We can't change how the USPS conducts their business or the integrity of their employees, up or down the food chain. If you have something expensive being shipped, go for the
insurance or go Fed Ex, UPS. Think of it this way: If you had to "ship" your child or dog.........what would you do, yourself, to insure safe delivery and who would you trust?
JMO. I have a great Post Office and all the people who work there are top notch. I have never had an "Issue" with anything I ever shipped or received that was directly or indirectly related to how they handled my mail.
Went out to box, nothing. Checked my tracking again still out for delivery. Half hour later I was outside and decided to take a look again expecting nothing and woohoo it was in the box. We have a new carrier.
