The slaughter of farmed insects for food, feed, and other products involves trillions of animals and raises urgent questions about which killing methods minimise potential suffering.
Insect slaughter welfare presents the welfare challenge at its most uncertain and its most numerically extreme. If insects have any capacity for suffering — and the evidence, while incomplete, supports taking this possibility seriously — then the trillions killed annually in food and feed production represent a welfare problem of potentially enormous scale. The precautionary principle applied to insect welfare suggests that when two killing methods produce equivalent economic outcomes, the one more likely to minimise suffering should be chosen, even under uncertainty. Freezing, which causes gradual insensibility, may be preferable to immediate shredding if cold aversion is demonstrable in target species, but the evidence is species-specific and developing. CO2 narcosis and rapid thermal killing are among the methods under most active investigation. Investing in slaughter welfare research now, while the industry is still establishing its practices, has high leverage for welfare improvement.