Commercial insect farming produces trillions of insects annually for protein production, and the welfare of farmed insects is an emerging ethical consideration given uncertainty about their sentience.
The moral status of farmed insects is genuinely uncertain, but this uncertainty itself is ethically significant given the enormous scale of production. If insects have any meaningful probability of experiencing suffering, the welfare burden of current industrial practice is enormous. Applying precautionary welfare standards including humane killing methods and optimal housing conditions costs little relative to production scale and addresses the uncertainty appropriately.