As insect farming scales globally for food and feed, questions about whether insects can suffer and what welfare means at industrial scale are becoming urgent.
Insect farming presents novel welfare challenges: billions of individuals per facility, tiny body size making individual assessment impossible, and fundamental uncertainty about their capacity to suffer. While insects lack the neural structures associated with conscious pain in vertebrates, behavioral evidence for nociception and stress responses exists. A precautionary approach supports minimizing potentially painful practices such as boiling alive, even under uncertainty. The scale of insect farming means that even small per-individual welfare improvements have enormous aggregate impact.