House crickets are increasingly farmed as a sustainable protein source. Their capacity for pain and suffering is scientifically uncertain but warrants precautionary welfare consideration.
The welfare status of crickets is genuinely uncertain - they lack the complex nervous system architecture associated with mammalian pain experience, but display behaviours that suggest they are not entirely insensitive to harmful stimuli. The precautionary principle - treating uncertain sentience with some moral consideration - would suggest that efforts to develop lower-stress rearing and more rapid kill methods are worthwhile even without definitive evidence of consciousness. Given the enormous numbers involved, even small probabilities of suffering matter morally.