The growing insect farming industry raises novel welfare questions about the sentience and suffering capacity of billions of insects raised for food and feed.
Insect farming presents one of the most philosophically complex welfare challenges in food production. The scientific evidence on insect sentience is genuinely uncertain — insects possess nociceptors and show avoidance behaviors suggesting pain perception, but whether these involve subjective experience comparable to vertebrates remains unresolved. The stakes are enormous: if insects have meaningful capacity to suffer, the welfare implications of farming them at the scale of trillions per year would be staggering. Applying the precautionary principle under this uncertainty suggests investing in welfare-improving practices — appropriate substrates, temperature management, and humane killing methods — while research on insect sentience advances. Several organizations including the Centre for Sentience Science are actively working on this question.