Insects and other invertebrates are farmed in enormous numbers for silk, food, animal feed, and pollination services. The question of invertebrate sentience and welfare is one of the most philosophically and practically challenging in animal ethics.
Invertebrate farming raises welfare questions that current science cannot definitively answer. The precautionary principle suggests that when we farm billions of individuals who may have some form of welfare-relevant experience, we should take reasonable steps to reduce potential suffering, even under uncertainty. For silkworms, this means supporting alternative production methods that avoid live killing. For farmed insects more broadly, it means developing welfare standards that provide appropriate environmental conditions and humane killing methods even as we continue to investigate the nature of invertebrate experience. The scale of invertebrate farming — potentially hundreds of trillions of individuals globally — means that even small probabilities of sentience create significant moral weight.