standards of welfare and commercial production for
example. Cheap, healthy, high welfare, environmentally
friendly chicken meat may not be a possibility.
The purpose
of this paper is to argue that the answers to such questions
should not be assumed in advance and need better empirical
data than is available at the moment. Widely held assumptions,
such as that commercially valuable growth rate is
inevitably linked to poor welfare, need to be challenged,
possibly by small-scale ‘risky’ breeding programmes that
set out to put such assumptions to the test and to collect
empirical data to see whether such traits can be selected for
separately. Some of the existing conflicts between
goals — such as that between production of broilers and
welfare of parent breeders — may not be as implacable as
they might seem at first. We will not know until we try.
Using a variety of genetic starting points and applying a
range of techniques, both old and new, there is now the
potential to shift the balance points and achieve far more of
all goals than is currently the case. But the potential is not
infinite and we may still come up against serious constraints
on what can be achieved.