If You See A Pawprint Sticker On Your Mailbox In Illinois Or Iowa, Leave It Alone

Just think of it as mailbox decor.

Mail carriers have to be one of the unsung heroes of daily jobs. They can even put dryer sheets in our mailboxes to help keep wasps out of it in the summer. Around the holidays, they hustle hard to get our packages and cards to their destinations before Christmas morning.

Mail carriers do have their share of challenges too, from obnoxious folks to weirdly addressed mail, and of course, dogs. Not the cuddly ones, the aggressive ones (like the pit bull my neighbor has that always "friendly" barks. Yeah sure.)

USPS Paw Program

In fact, back in 2023, according to USPS, Illinois ranked number 6th in dog attacks on USPS drivers.

To help curtail this and try to keep their drivers safe, in 2020, USPS rolled out their Paw Program. They've expanded it over the last few years. So here's how it works:

Mail carriers put paw print stickers on the house a dog lives at and the house before a dog as well, a release from USPS says. The stickers are bright yellow and orange and look like this.

The orange sticker lets carriers know there is a dog at this home. The yellow cautions the carrier that there is a dog at the next house.

If these pop up on your mailbox, don't lose your interior designer mind. They're not that big, for one thing. It's there to serve as a heads-up to the driver to be careful when approaching either a house near you or your house specifically. If you do get a sticker, you'll also get a postcard explaining the program and why the sticker is there.

USPS says that this program is working well across the country when it's used along with "local alerts as postal employees approach the house and written notification cards within the mail".