Pingree, a Maine Democrat, is raising the issue of the dead chicks and the losses farms are facing in a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and U.S. Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sonny Perdue, according to CBS News.
Maine’s Portland Press Herald first broke the story on Wednesday, telling Pauline Henderson’s story. Henderson owns and operates Pine Tree Poultry, a family farm and chicken meat processing facility that specializes in chicken pot pies.
All 800 chicks she received from a hatchery in Pennsylvania last week arrived dead. “Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.”
Henderson told the newspaper thousands of birds that moved through the Postal Service’s processing center in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, were also dead, impacting several farms in Maine and New Hampshire, reports the Morning Call.
The Postal Service’s media contact for the Eastern U.S. did not immediately return a Press Herald reporter’s message Wednesday.
“It’s one more of the consequences of this disorganization, this sort of chaos they’ve created at the post office and nobody thought through when they were thinking of slowing down the mail,” Pingree said, adding that her office has received dozens of complaints from farmers and others trying to raise a small flock of chickens in the backyard. “This is a system that’s always worked before and it’s worked very well until these changes started being made,” Pingree said.
According to Politico, Steve Doherty, a spokesperson for the USPS, said the agency “can’t locate a claim being filed for this loss.” Some animals, including live chicks, can be mailed safely under proper conditions.
Louis DeJoy is a Trump supporter and campaign donor who was appointed by the president to take over the job of Postmaster General. He is also the first person to head the USPS who did not come from the ranks of the Postal Service. The very first thing DeJoy did on taking over in June was to immediately put into place cuts and operational changes that are disrupting mail delivery operations.
And Trump made it clear last week that he was blocking $25 billion in emergency aid to the Postal Service, acknowledging he wanted to curtail election mail operations.
