Somewhere between Texas and Alabama, something went very, very wrong for eight captive songbirds.<\/p>\n
A salon owner in the tiny town of Grant, Alabama, ordered the canaries from Texas, she told AL.com – a birthday present to herself.<\/p>\n
Rhonda King paid an extra $100 to ship them overnight. But her 60th birthday came and went Dec. 5. No birds, and none the next day.<\/p>\n
Three days late, the letter carrier finally walked into her salon, she told AL.com.<\/p>\n
“Your birds arrived,” she remembered him saying.<\/p>\n
“They’re not alive.”<\/p>\n
This was evident from the state of the package, King told the reporter: “I was handed this box with tire tracks on it and bird carnage hanging out.”<\/p>\n
Before meeting disaster on the road, King said, the birds had been packaged with air holes in a federally compliant box.<\/p>\n
In fact, the U.S. Postal Service has strict guidelines on mail-order animals – from songbirds to snakes.<\/p>\n
Kittens, for example, are “not mailable” under USPS Publication 52, Section 525.<\/p>\n
Neither are “poisonous insects and all spiders, except scorpions under limited circumstances.”<\/p>\n
Day-old chickens, on the other hand, can be mailed.<\/p>\n
If everything goes right, anyway.<\/p>\n
It didn’t for a farmer in Mercer, Maine, who told the Morning Sentinel in 2014 that his order of 25 baby chicks arrived late and as dead as King’s canaries.<\/p>\n
The owner of the hatchery that mailed the chicks told the outlet that 1 or 2 percent of its shipments die in transit – up to 26,000 dead chickens a year.<\/p>\n
And a PETA case worker told the outlet that the group received thousands of reports of dead or suffering animals in transit.<\/p>\n
King’s mess of songbirds seems to be a rare case, though. And the USPS tried to make amends.<\/p>\n
The Postal Service followed up with a belated apology, per the Associated Press, and offered to reimburse the stylist.<\/p>\n
The government couldn’t bring back her birds. Still, a faint hope remained.<\/p>\n
King had ordered eight live canaries and received just six dead ones.<\/p>\n
The Postal Service didn’t return a call from The Washington Post about what exactly befell the shipment – leaving open the possibility that two missing birds are brightening the skies over Alabama.<\/p>\n
(c) 2016, The Washington Post \u00b7 Avi Selk<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somewhere between Texas and Alabama, something went very, very wrong for eight captive songbirds. A salon owner in the tiny town of Grant, Alabama, ordered the canaries from Texas, she told AL.com – a birthday present to herself. Rhonda King paid an extra $100 to ship them overnight. But her 60th birthday came and went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5409,"featured_media":95188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n