Commercial insect farming is growing rapidly as a sustainable protein source, but fundamental questions about insect sentience and welfare standards in this industry remain largely unaddressed.
Insect farming has been embraced as an environmental solution to protein production, but welfare considerations have largely been sidelined in this framing. If insects have the capacity to experience aversive states — a question that remains scientifically open but increasingly taken seriously — then the scale of insect farming creates enormous potential welfare concerns. Developing precautionary welfare guidelines for insect farming, investing in sentience research, and establishing killing method standards are appropriate responses to this uncertainty.