We have set a number of aspirational goals for a programme
to selectively breed for improved broiler welfare alongside
commercial traits, goals that, if they were all achieved,
would satisfy a large number of stakeholders. But, in reality,
is it possible to achieve them all? In the end, will we be
forced to make difficult choices — between acceptable
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.