The silk industry involves the boiling or steaming alive of billions of silkworm pupae annually to extract silk filaments, raising welfare questions about insect sentience at commercial scale.
Silk welfare occupies a similar philosophical position to bivalve welfare: significant uncertainty about sentience, enormous scale, and limited current regulatory or consumer attention. Silkworms have a simple nervous system; whether boiling causes suffering in a morally significant sense is genuinely uncertain given current science. The scale -- hundreds of billions of individuals annually -- means that even low probability of sentience, multiplied by this number, generates a welfare concern worth taking seriously. Peace silk provides a production alternative that eliminates killing of pupae, though at higher cost and lower yield. For welfare-conscious consumers, it represents a meaningful choice in the face of uncertainty.