As insect farming scales globally to produce protein for food and feed, welfare questions about the capacity of insects to suffer are becoming practically urgent, not merely philosophical.
Insect welfare sits at the frontier of animal welfare science and policy. The scale of insect farming - trillions of individuals - means that even a small probability of meaningful suffering creates an enormous potential welfare obligation. The precautionary principle suggests that investing in research on insect sentience, developing welfare guidelines for the major farmed species, and identifying the least harmful killing methods is warranted even before scientific certainty is established. The insect farming industry, if it grows as projected, could represent the largest single source of farmed animal suffering by number - or, if managed well, a genuinely lower-suffering alternative to vertebrate animal agriculture.