The insect farming industry is growing rapidly for food and feed, and welfare standards are beginning to emerge despite significant scientific uncertainty about insect sentience.
Insect welfare sits at the frontier of moral consideration, where scientific uncertainty about sentience meets practical urgency about scaling sustainable protein. The insect nervous system differs fundamentally from vertebrate systems, but nociceptors and stress responses have been documented in multiple insect species. Given the astronomical scale of insect farming - potentially trillions of animals - even small welfare improvements per individual aggregate to enormous impact. The precautionary approach is to develop and implement welfare standards now, before the industry scales further, rather than waiting for definitive sentience evidence that may never arrive.