Insect farming for food and animal feed is expanding rapidly, with growing scientific debate about the welfare implications of mass production of potentially sentient beings at enormous scale.
Insect farming welfare is a scale problem: even if individual insect sentience probability is low (say 5%), the welfare significance at a trillion individuals annually is enormous. The precautionary principle argument for considering insect welfare becomes stronger with scale. Practical welfare improvements include: providing appropriate environmental conditions (temperature, substrate, humidity matching evolved preferences); appropriate killing methods (cold narcosis, heat, controlled atmosphere) rather than slow drying; and species selection favouring lower-sentience species for mass production.