Agricultural pest management kills trillions of insects annually through pesticides, raising emerging welfare questions as evidence for insect pain experience accumulates.
Insect welfare in agriculture sits at the frontier of welfare ethics where scientific uncertainty about insect pain experience intersects with agricultural practice affecting inconceivable numbers of animals. If insects experience anything analogous to pain, the welfare implications of agricultural pesticide use are staggering in scale. The mode of action of different pesticides has different welfare implications: rapid-acting contact pesticides cause faster death than systemic pesticides causing prolonged neurological disruption. The precautionary principle suggests that reducing the scale of insect killing through IPM and organic practices is warranted even under uncertainty about insect sentience, and additional welfare benefits accrue through preservation of beneficial insect populations including pollinators.