Illinois, If You See A Paw Print Sticker On Your Mailbox, Don’t Touch It

If you find a colorful paw print on your mailbox, it's best to just leave it there.

Our mail carriers do a lot to help us. They can put dryer sheets in our mailboxes to help ward off wasps or yellowjackets. Around the holidays, they bust their butts to get our packages and cards to their recipients before Santa comes hauling down the chimney.

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They do have to deal with a lot of crap too, from unnecessarily annoyed folks to weirdly addressed mail, all the way to dogs.

USPS Paw Program

One thing they have to deal with are very aggressive dogs. In fact, according to USPS, Illinois ranks number 6th in dog attacks on USPS drivers and this week happens to be National Dog Bite Awareness Week.

To help curtail this and try to keep their drivers safe, USPS is expanding their Paw Program. They're putting paw print stickers on not only the house a dog lives at but the house before a dog as well, a release from USPS says. The stickers are bright yellow and orange and look like this.

If these pop up on your mailbox, it's just to serve as a heads-up to the driver to be careful when approaching either the house after you or your house specifically. If you do get one, you'll also get a postcard explaining the program.

USPS says that this program has been successful in other markets when it's used along with "local alerts as postal employees approach the house and written notification cards within the mail".

It's a orange or yellow little sticker on your mailbox but it's a good idea to just let it stay there.