Cricket farming for food and feed is growing rapidly. As the industry scales, the welfare question - do crickets suffer, and if so how should we treat them - becomes increasingly urgent.
Cricket welfare sits in the same uncertain space as other insect welfare: nociception is established, subjective suffering is uncertain, and the scale of production is enormous. Tens of billions of crickets being produced for food means that even a small probability of morally significant suffering creates a large welfare obligation. The precautionary approach suggests that cricket farming should adopt minimum welfare standards - appropriate stocking densities, temperature-appropriate housing, rapid killing methods - even while the science develops. The alternative (ignoring welfare until sentience is definitively proved) risks retrospective recognition of enormous historical harm, analogous to the belated recognition of fish sentience.