As insect farming grows for food and animal feed, welfare questions about the capacity of insects to suffer and the conditions of mass rearing require urgent scientific attention.
Insect farming presents a unique welfare challenge: the scale is enormous, the species involved are biologically very different from vertebrates, and scientific consensus on their capacity for suffering remains uncertain. The precautionary principle suggests that we should err on the side of welfare protection even under uncertainty. Some researchers argue that insects show nociceptive responses suggesting awareness of tissue damage, while others dispute that this constitutes suffering in a morally relevant sense. As insect farming scales up to hundreds of billions of individuals, resolving this question becomes increasingly urgent.