Insect farming is growing rapidly as a protein source for feed and food. The welfare implications depend on highly uncertain questions about insect sentience and pain capacity.
Insect farming welfare sits at one of the most uncertain frontiers in animal ethics. The question of whether insects have morally significant subjective experiences cannot currently be definitively answered, but the scale of production makes the stakes of getting this wrong enormous. If insects do experience something like pain or distress at even a fraction of the intensity of vertebrates, the trillions of insects farmed annually represent a welfare problem dwarfing conventional livestock in numeric terms. Precautionary approaches — developing humane stunning methods, avoiding conditions that appear to cause aversive responses, and treating welfare uncertainty as a reason for caution rather than dismissal — are justified by the potential stakes. The insect farming industry has an opportunity to build welfare standards from inception rather than retrofitting them after decades of harmful practices, as happened with vertebrate livestock farming.