The rapid expansion of insect farming for food and animal feed raises welfare questions that the scientific community is still working to answer, given genuine uncertainty about insect sentience and capacity for suffering.
Insect welfare sits at the frontier of welfare science where uncertainty is genuine rather than manufactured. The question of whether insects have subjective experiences of pain is not settled, and the answer matters enormously given the scale of insect farming. If insects can suffer, insect farming may represent the largest source of agricultural welfare harm by individual count. If they cannot, insect farming offers important sustainability benefits without welfare costs. A precautionary approach — minimizing conditions that would cause suffering if insects are sentient while the science develops — is both ethically defensible and practically achievable with modest effort.