Mail delivery by animal

In the early years of Alaska settlement, there was no regular mail service to the interior post offices during the winter months (October to May), although individuals might agree to transport letters to coastal areas.

Riders on horseback could take small bundles quickly, while carts pulled by horses could take large amounts of mail very long distances.

On behalf of the far-flung Habsburg dynasty of The Holy Roman Empire, Franz von Taxis set up a courier network that grew to cover all of Western Europe in the middle of the 16th century.

[7] The Pony Express was a fast mail service crossing the North American continent from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast, operating from April 1860 to November 1861.

It briefly reduced the time for mail to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to around ten days before being replaced by the First transcontinental railroad and the telegraph.

The Dutch government established a civil and military system in Java and Sumatra early in the last century, the birds being obtained from Baghdad.

When the possibility of using the birds between military fortresses had been thoroughly tested attention was turned to their use for naval purposes, to send messages from the coast to ships at sea.

[10] In the 1870s, a satirical article[11] by William L. Alden in the New York Times claimed that cats were being trained in Liège, Belgium to deliver mail to replace homing pigeons.

After the article was widely and uncritically reported in the late 2010s, the Belgian broadcaster RTBF in 2023 published an analysis of the urban legend,[12] which also highlights the real-life role that cats have played in keeping post offices free of rodents which can damage mail.