UK Government Committee Favors In-Ovo Sexing

The UK government’s official Animal Welfare Committee (AWC) recently came out in favor of in-ovo sexing as a solution to the challenge of male chick culling in the UK egg industry. They were asked to conduct a thorough analysis of the technology for the UK market and come up with a recommendation for the UK government based on the commercial readiness of the technology, and of the impact on animal welfare. Among other things, the report recommends that the governments should follow Germany’s lead in banning male chick culling, but that the government should also provide financial incentives for producers to introduce in-ovo sexing technology. It also reaffirms that the current best scientific evidence suggests that embryos develop the capacity for sentience at day 13 of incubation at the earliest.

The AWC is an advisory organization to the UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs along with the Scottish and Welsh Governments. The committee is currently composed of 14 veterinarians from across the UK, who are mandated to provide independent, authoritative, and impartial advice to His Majesty’s Government, and, by all accounts, left no stone unturned in their investigation into in-ovo sexing. Currently, eggs made with in-ovo sexing are not available in the UK. It remains to be seen whether the committee’s recommendations will become official government policy.

The committee worked with a wide variety of stakeholders for this report, including in-ovo sexing technology producers, hatcheries, egg producers, and poultry trade organizations. The in-depth report gave a number of interesting insights into the in-ovo sexing market. For example, they cited that the price of an in-ovo sexed chick might run a farm £3 versus 75 pence for a conventional chick. Given that a hen lays around 350 eggs, this amounts to a cost of less than one penny per table egg.