Insect farming for food and feed is growing rapidly, with billions of insects farmed annually in controlled conditions. Whether insects are sentient enough to warrant welfare consideration is an urgent and unresolved question with enormous ethical implications.
Insect farming welfare sits at the frontier of moral uncertainty. If insects are not sentient, farming them at scale involves no morally relevant suffering and their environmental advantages over conventional livestock make them clearly beneficial. If insects have even limited sentience, the billions farmed annually represent a welfare concern of enormous scale. The precautionary principle — applied by several prominent welfare scientists including Jonathan Birch — suggests we should implement welfare measures for farmed insects even under uncertainty, since the cost is low and the potential welfare benefit large. This means: studying which killing methods are most rapid and least likely to cause pain, providing appropriate substrate and social conditions, and avoiding unnecessary harm during farming processes.