Insect farming is growing rapidly as a sustainable protein source. As billions of insects are farmed for food, feed, and other uses, questions about insect sentience and welfare are increasingly relevant.
Insect welfare occupies a genuinely uncertain space in animal welfare science. The evidence for insect sentience is weaker than for vertebrates and most invertebrates covered by welfare legislation, but is not zero. Insects possess nociceptors and show wound-avoidance behaviour. Whether they have the neural architecture for subjective pain experience remains contested. The scale of insect farming means that even low probabilities of sentience multiplied across billions of individuals could represent significant welfare relevance. The low cost of improving end-of-life methods including rapid CO2 or cold stunning before processing makes applying the precautionary principle practically achievable. As insect farming scales up, investment in welfare research specific to farmed species is both ethically warranted and commercially prudent.