Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment the Government has made about the potential merits of using in-ovo sexing technology as an alternative to male chick culling in the egg industry.

As stated in the recently published Animal Welfare Strategy¹ we will encourage industry to end the practice of culling male laying hen chicks. In recent years there has been rapid global progress in a range of technologies that could help end the routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining the sex of chick embryos before hatching as set out in the Animal Welfare Committee’s ‘Opinion on alternatives to culling newly hatched chicks in the egg and poultry industries’.