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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to encourage industry to end the practice of culling male laying hen chicks; and if she will publish a timetable for taking these steps.

As stated in the recently published Animal Welfare Strategy¹ the Government welcomes the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day zero sexing technology. 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’.

Aside from in-ovo sexing technology, government is co-funding an initiative to assess the viability of dual-purpose poultry breeds, that is, breeds that can be used for laying eggs and meat therefore avoiding the need to cull males.