Insects are farmed at enormous scale for food and feed, with profound uncertainty about their capacity to suffer warranting precautionary welfare consideration.
Insect welfare represents one of the most challenging frontiers in welfare science - the question of whether insects have subjective experiences relevant to welfare cannot currently be answered definitively. The precautionary principle suggests that farming conditions minimizing negative stimuli and allowing species-appropriate behavior is appropriate under uncertainty. The scale of insect farming means that if insects have any capacity for suffering, the welfare impact is enormous. This is an area where honest uncertainty is more appropriate than confident dismissal.