Insect farming is growing rapidly as a sustainable protein source; welfare considerations must be integrated into scaling decisions despite ongoing uncertainty about insect sentience.
Insect farming welfare decisions made now, during the scaling phase, will determine the welfare baseline for an industry that may process trillions of animals annually. Precautionary welfare integration — optimizing temperature and substrate conditions, avoiding extreme crowding, and adopting the most humane available slaughter methods — costs relatively little during design and scales efficiently once established. The argument for precautionary welfare is strongest precisely when uncertainty is high: if insects do experience negative states, the scale of potential suffering in unoptimized systems is immense. Getting welfare right during scale-up is dramatically more tractable than retrofitting established systems.