The rapid growth of insect farming for food and feed raises increasingly serious welfare questions as evidence accumulates that insects may have richer inner lives than previously assumed.
Insect farming welfare sits at the frontier of animal ethics, where scientific uncertainty about sentience meets enormous and growing scale. If insects experience suffering in morally significant ways - an increasingly live scientific debate - then the welfare implications of insect farming at industrial scale are enormous. The precautionary approach suggests taking insect welfare seriously: optimising rearing conditions for positive welfare indicators (where these can be identified), using slaughter methods that minimise potential suffering, and funding research into insect sentience. The alternative - dismissing insect welfare because certainty about their sentience is lacking - risks a historic moral error if evidence continues to accumulate for their capacity for suffering.