Insect farming for human food and animal feed is expanding rapidly, raising welfare questions that the industry has been slow to address despite growing evidence of insect sentience.
Farmed insect welfare sits at the intersection of scale, uncertainty, and regulatory absence. If insects have any capacity for suffering - even at a fraction of vertebrate capacity - the numbers involved make this potentially the largest animal welfare issue in agriculture. The precautionary approach argues for developing and implementing welfare standards now, before the industry scales further. Simple welfare improvements - appropriate density, temperature, humidity, food quality, and humane slaughter - are low-cost relative to production value and can be implemented immediately.