Billions of insects are killed daily in farming, pest control, and food production. Emerging evidence on insect sentience raises important ethical questions about our treatment of them.
Insect welfare sits at the frontier of welfare science and ethics. The evidence for insect sentience - the capacity for subjective experience including pain - is growing but contested. Bees show behavioural and physiological responses to potentially painful stimuli that have characteristics of pain responses in vertebrates. If even a fraction of insects can suffer, the scale of potential suffering is almost incomprehensible given the billions killed daily. The appropriate response to uncertainty is moral caution - reducing unnecessary insect killing and supporting research to clarify the question of insect sentience.