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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department has made an assessment of the commercial viability of 'day-zero' systems where genetically edited breeding hens ensure only female layer chicks hatch, eliminating the need for male chick culling in the egg industry.

As stated in the recently published Animal Welfare Strategy Defra 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’. Whilst ‘day-zero’ systems are not yet commercially viable, Defra continues to follow developments in the space closely.