While hatcheries used to file claims with the post office when birds died in transit because they had been left on a delivery truck too long or sent to the wrong destination, that’s no longer the norm. The relationship between hatcheries and the USPS is just too tenuous. “I don’t know of any hatchery that makes a claim with the post office,” Metzer says. “We want to keep their service. We don’t want a reason for [the USPS] to come back and say, ‘We don’t want to do this anymore.’”

Until the mid-1990s, the majority of backyard poultry owners kept live chickens to help support their families—either with extra pocket money, extra food, or both. “That’s not the reasoning anymore,” says Angie Dunlap, co-owner of Dunlap Hatchery in Caldwell, Idaho. The urban homesteading movement, which takes “buy local” to the extreme, quickly added keeping chickens to the basic package of homesteading skills. But now it’s common for backyard poultry keepers to have only a handful of chickens—which is a move away from chickens as a cost-effective food source toward chickens as pets, or as lifestyle objects.

People buying chickens for varied egg color or to act as “living yard art”—as the writers of one backyard poultry book described their hens—are happy to spend lavishly to get exactly what they want. Celebrities, from Martha Stewart and Isabella Rossellini to Oprah, have made their own backyard chickens part of their brands. And hatchery websites are happy to note when a celebrity has sourced chickens from them or whether a variety, like the chocolate-egg-laying Copper Marans, for example, is one you might recognize from Stewart’s Instagram feed. The chickens she chooses to keep frequently wind up as the next big thing in poultry. The trend of fowl-as-lifestyle-accessory would not have surged without the USPS underwriting the accessibility of breeds hatched from anywhere in the country.