Insect farming for food and feed is growing rapidly, raising welfare questions about the sentience, housing conditions, and slaughter of animals produced in astronomical numbers.
Insect farming welfare sits at the frontier of moral uncertainty. If insects have any capacity for suffering, the scale of farming, trillions of animals, dwarfs all other animal agriculture combined. If they do not, the welfare concern is minimal. Current evidence is insufficient to resolve this question definitively, making the precautionary principle the most defensible approach. Low-cost improvements to housing conditions, substrate quality, and slaughter methods can be implemented with minimal production cost even under uncertainty. Research into insect sentience is among the highest-priority welfare science questions of the decade.