Cold weather is the biggest challenge in shipping livestock — and the one we plan for most carefully. Here’s exactly how we get animals and feeders to your door alive, warm and unstressed through winter.
Why winter shipping needs a plan
Reptiles and invertebrates are ectotherms: they can’t generate their own body heat, so they take on the temperature around them. Let a parcel sit in a freezing depot overnight and the animal inside chills with it. Crickets in particular are unforgiving — sustained temperatures below roughly 77–80°F (25–27°C) hit their survivability hard. The goal of winter packing isn’t to create tropical warmth inside the box; it’s to hold the temperature in a safe band until the parcel reaches you.
Insulated boxes
Everything ships in a box lined with polystyrene (styrofoam) insulation. That liner is doing most of the work: it buffers the animal from the outside air and, just as importantly, slows sudden temperature swings when a parcel moves between a cold van and a warm depot. A bare cardboard box is never acceptable for livestock, however short the journey.
Heat packs, matched to the forecast
For cold-weather orders we include a 40-hour heat pack — the industry standard for livestock. A few things worth knowing about how they work:
- They take around 40–50 minutes to activate and then give off a steady output, peaking at roughly 17–19 hours in.
- In a typical one-cubic-foot insulated box, the first pack lifts the internal temperature by about 12–16°F, with each additional pack adding around 10°F.
- We never let a heat pack touch the animal’s container directly. It’s positioned against the box wall so it warms the air, not the animal — a heat pack in direct contact can cause burns or overheating.
We check the forecast for both our location and yours, and scale the number of packs to the coldest leg of the journey.
Timing and tracking
We ship early in the week to avoid parcels sitting in a depot over a weekend, and we use tracked, next-day delivery so animals spend as little time in transit as possible. You’ll get tracking details when your order leaves us, and we’ll often hold a shipment back a day if the weather is genuinely dangerous rather than risk it.
What to do when your parcel arrives
- Be there for delivery if you can, or arrange a safe place — a parcel left in the cold undoes all the packing.
- Open it somewhere warm and calm, away from draughts and direct heat.
- Let the animal settle. A newly arrived reptile or invert has had a long day; give it time in its enclosure before handling or feeding.
- Check the temperature of the box, not just the animal. If anything looks wrong, photograph it and contact us straight away.
Our live arrival guarantee
All of this sits behind our live arrival guarantee. Pack it properly, ship it fast, stand behind it — that’s the whole philosophy. If something goes wrong in transit despite our best efforts, get in touch with photos and we’ll make it right.
Sources & further reading: USARK animal shipping guidelines, MorphMarket shipping temperature guide, UniHeat shipping best practices.