WARNING: Hoovers hatchery

[JacinLarkwell]

chickens for 1000s of years before USPS.

Being able to ship chicks and other poultry has allowed people to get far more breeds than just whatever people within driving distance have. If I had to rely on driving distance, I'd probably be stuck with Wyandotte (silver or gold laced, nothing fancy), Australorp (black, again, nothing fancy) and barred rocks. Nevermind that it would be near impossible to get CX for anyone that raises them

 

[TexasBlues]

That’s really vague. Your own or you buy eggs somewhere orrrr???

I buy fertile eggs locally and shipped. What else do you want to know about them?
Personally I don’t think shipping eggs is cruel.
I don’t honestly care if it’s 10% or 1% of chicks that die in shipment. I don’t want to gamble with someone’s life.

 

[No Coop No Problem]

But, its not really their fault. It's too cold to be ordering chicks right now.

So it is their fault. I wouldn't sell an animal to someone if it had a high chance of negligent death

 

[NatJ]

Is there a reason they don’t use heat packs? Just wondering, is there a chance of chicks overheating?

I think the chick-shipping methods were mostly developed before heat packs became available. When they work well, there is no reason to change.

Hatcheries that ship very small orders (under about 15) usually do mention heat packs in their packing information.

And yes, there is a chance of chicks overheating.

I have no personal experience with heat packs, but I have read of them overheating and killing plants, reptiles, fish, etc. I have also read of them running down and being cold at some point, and the package being too cold when it arrives. Some years ago, I saw a chart of the temperature produced by a heat pack (one brand, one time). It got warm, went up to a range that's too hot for chicks, then dropped off to a too-cold temperature that would have left chicks chilly before arriving at their destination. There might be other heat packs that would be fine, but that one certainly was not.

Depending on the physical size of the heat pack, there is some risk of it crushing chicks as the box is jostled around.

There is also the issue of cost. The heat pack costs money. Putting the heat pack in the package takes extra time (more if it secured in some way, less if it is just dropped in.) That time costs money, because the hatchery has to pay the workers doing it. The heat pack also adds weight, which could increase the cost of postage, because postage is usually figured by weight. There will always be some people who order from the cheapest source, which means the hatchery that doesn't use heat packs will have an advantage with those customers.

And I know some or really most duck hatcheries I’ve seen had a minimum of 2 ducks per order and that doesn’t seem like enough to keep completely warm but correct me if I’m wrong! I’ve never ordered from hatcheries before but I was planning on.

I don't know for sure about the duck hatcheries. I am pretty sure those low minimums are a recent thing (within the last decade or so), and I think they are probably using heat packs in some weather (although I don't know for sure.) You could look on their shipping and information pages to see whether they say.

Also on the topic of your poor babies being shipped in bad weather…

this is really irresponsible of the hatchery. Shipping in good weather should be in the responsibility of the sender rather than the person ordering who, like you, probably doesn’t know any better! This is a huge thing in the reptile and fish community that people will refuse to ship pets during cold peaks and will inform the receiver of that!

Unfortunately, the hatchery CANNOT wait to ship the chicks.
They set the eggs 3 weeks before shipping, which is too early to know what the weather will be.
When the chicks hatch, they must be shipped within 24 hours. The Post Office requires this, and will refuse to accept chicks older than this.

Chicks absorb the yolk before they hatch, so they can go about 72 hours without eating & drinking. If the hatchery waits a day or two, they will be shipping chicks that starve or dehydrate in the mail, so they will die anyway. If the hatchery waits for the weather to clear up, it could often be a week, and the hatchery is not set up to raise chicks for that length of time. Besides, chicks that are a week old cannot be shipped through the mail, because they cannot safely go 2-3 days with no food and water (again, dead chicks, prevented by Post Office regulations that forbid shipping of chicks that age.)

When the weather is very bad, some hatcheries do cancel orders. It happened with Hoovers and McMurray [edit: and Meyers] last year when the Post Office cancelled flights & mail delivery because of extreme bad weather:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ing-customers-to-the-end-of-the-line.1562129/
Customers were very unhappy about that too. At least one of the hatcheries sold large numbers of chicks to anyone within driving/trucking distance, and I'm not sure what the other one did.
Some of the people with canceled orders were not happy (understatement). There was discussion about whether hatcheries should try to fill their orders the next week (bumping all the people from that week, and annoying more people), or whether the hatcheries should just leave them to re-schedule later (chicks all sold out for months). I think everyone sort-of agreed that all options were bad, but disagreed about which was worse (the hatcheries had already made their decisions, so this was just people arguing about what the hatcheries "should have done.")

 

[ShrekDawg]

I buy fertile eggs locally and shipped. What else do you want to know about them?
Personally I don’t think shipping eggs is cruel.
I don’t honestly care if it’s 10% or 1% of chicks that die in shipment. I don’t want to gamble with someone’s life.

Ah okay

 

[Chikenshiken]

Unfortunately, the hatchery CANNOT wait to ship the chicks.
They set the eggs 3 weeks before shipping, which is too early to know what the weather will be.
When the chicks hatch, they must be shipped within 24 hours. The Post Office requires this, and will refuse to accept chicks older than this.

Chicks absorb the yolk before they hatch, so they can go about 72 hours without eating & drinking. If the hatchery waits a day or two, they will be shipping chicks that starve or dehydrate in the mail, so they will die anyway. If the hatchery waits for the weather to clear up, it could often be a week, and the hatchery is not set up to raise chicks for that length of time. Besides, chicks that are a week old cannot be shipped through the mail, because they cannot safely go 2-3 days with no food and water (again, dead chicks, prevented by Post Office regulations that forbid shipping of chicks that age.)

When the weather is very bad, some hatcheries do cancel orders. It happened with Hoovers and McMurray last year when the Post Office cancelled flights & mail delivery because of extreme bad weather:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ing-customers-to-the-end-of-the-line.1562129/
Customers were very unhappy about that too. At least one of the hatcheries sold large numbers of chicks to anyone within driving/trucking distance, and I'm not sure what the other one did.
Some of the people with canceled orders were not happy (understatement). There was discussion about whether hatcheries should try to fill their orders the next week (bumping all the people from that week, and annoying more people), or whether the hatcheries should just leave them to re-schedule later (chicks all sold out for months). I think everyone sort-of agreed that all options were bad, but disagreed about which was worse (the hatcheries had already made their decisions, so this was just people arguing about what the hatcheries "should have done.")

I’m not a hatchery expert lol but I wonder if there is still anyway around this. I agree with you that waiting is bad because of yolk absorbtion but I also agree that going ahead and sending them in very cold weather is also bad. I’m sure there is a valid solution it’s just hard to come up with one when you aren’t in the hatcheries position. But one thing I do agree is that hatcheries still hold responsibility in this particular situation and the fact that they are not/barely responding to emails is extremely unprofessional. If 10 out of 15 chicks died they should offer a refund at least

 

[TexasBlues]

Being able to ship chicks and other poultry has allowed people to get far more breeds than just whatever people within driving distance have. If I had to rely on driving distance, I'd probably be stuck with Wyandotte (silver or gold laced, nothing fancy), Australorp (black, again, nothing fancy) and barred rocks. Nevermind that it would be near impossible to get CX for anyone that raises them

Do people not ship eggs for your novelty breeds?

 

[NatJ]

I’m not a hatchery expert lol but I wonder if there is still anyway around this. I agree with you that waiting is bad because of yolk absorbtion but I also agree that going ahead and sending them in very cold weather is also bad. I’m sure there is a valid solution it’s just hard to come up with one when you aren’t in the hatcheries position. But one thing I do agree is that hatcheries still hold responsibility in this particular situation and the fact that they are not/barely responding to emails is extremely unprofessional. If 10 out of 15 chicks died they should offer a refund at least

The obvious way around it: only sell locally.

The hatchery could limit what months they sell chicks, or only ship to certain states in certain months. This would not completely avoid the problem, but could help. But the customers in other states might be just as upset if they can't order (and they will complain during a week when the weather really was acceptable.)

Some hatcheries do either or both of those. You don't hear much about those hatcheries, except from people who say "They wouldn't ship when I wanted, so I ordered from Hoovers instead" (or something similar.) So part of the problem really does lie with the person who placed the order: they could have ordered for a different month, or bought from a local hatchery, or ordered an incubator and fertile eggs. I do wish the hatcheries would make warnings a bit more obvious, telling people there could be problems if they order chicks shipped during certain months.

If the hatchery has already pre-sold the chicks, set the eggs, and hatched the chicks: the only reasonable options are to ship the chicks, or to cancel/reschedule the order and do something else with those chicks. The "something else" could be selling them locally or shipped to someone in an area with better weather, or it could be killing the chicks. There is a limit to how many chicks the hatchery can sell at the last minute to local people, or even to customers by mail who live in warmer climates, so there would probably still be a lot of dead chicks this way (but deliberately killed, rather than dying in a shipping box.)

 

[ShrekDawg]

Do people not ship eggs for your novelty breeds?

Eggs are more of a risk. They might not hatch at all or you might end up with all boys. Which, granted, not every shipped chick will survive either but still. At least you can order girls and have a pretty good chance of getting them. Also not everybody has the means or desire to hatch eggs. It’s a lot of time and effort to get right.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Do people not ship eggs for your novelty breeds?

Not that I've found except from unmoitored places like Ebay. Some breeders I've found refuse to ship cross country or refuse to ship eggs because of the low success rate of eggs but will ship chicks if they have extras (though they also said that wouldn't be very likely because of how they do their breeding for their lines), leaving adult birds as what they had avaliable to ship.