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lotsoffish wrote:

diburning wrote:

I can just imagine a guy handling packages... He sees the label "live fish".  He thinks to himself.  Really?  Then he picks up the box and shakes it.  Heeeerrrre fishy fishy are you guys in there?

Then your fish arrive with shaken baby syndrome.

LOL!

I know you are just trying to be funny but there is a whole lot of truth to what you are saying.

As the shipper we can 100% control how we pack our boxes and what goes on inside our boxes on the way to the buyer.

What we can't control is how our boxes are treated on the way to the buyer.

Therefor, we should want ALL our boxes treated the same way. By writing anything on the outside of the box we are setting ourselves up for trouble.

Think about it. You are shipping tropical fish and you write perishable on the box. What's that mean to the shipping company? They don't know if you are shipping frozen porterhouse steaks or discus fish.

In my opinion you are better off writing "Ink cartridges" OR NOTHING on your box, that way nobody cares about what's in the box and it just moves through the system in a normal fashion which is really exactly what we should want to happen in the first place.

Yeah, I've gotten the same story myself from postal workers (there are A-holes that will deliberately screw with your package just because it has all these "handle with caution" & "Fragile" labels et on it)

Still, there is a catch 22....marking a box with no labels has issues also: shipping fish usually means liquid...

...now trust me here: ship any box full of liquid, then don't declare it (or lie to the postmaster)...then have said box break or damage the other packages....now what? Do you think you will always get off scott free?

...it's not as if you aren't culpable anyway, but your odds of paying for damages go up for non-labeled packages that don't comply with postal regs (pose that question to your local Postmaster and see what they say)
....and you are in violation of those regs IF you don't properly label live animal shipments...

That said, The USPS used to use FedEx for air delivery...and VERY often FedEx would apply their native FedEx rules even though they aren't supposed to....translation: your "live animal" labeled package can be delayed due to the layers of rules and bureaucracy...

I don't know how to quote from another thread, but here is a link to a post here about the right way to label fish and it includes the code they ship it under.

http://www.aquaboards.com/viewtopic.php?id=7444

Fish are perfectly fine to ship within the US, but you can't ship fish via Priority to other countries, per USPS guidelines.

I don't usually tell them if I am shipping fish, but I have told them I was sending water out for analysis if you could hear or feel water sloshing.

That's the legal way...I posted something similar here, on other boards and on the NOKA website

my take:  I at least use a liquid label on the package and depending on the destination and weather, sometimes a "perishable" label, but the "official way" USED TO BE for (good or bad) is to label

PERISHABLE
SMALL COLD BLOODED ANIMALS
DMM CO22.3.2

That could be outdated/superceded...regardless we all probably need to check upon that