Insect Farming & Consciousness

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Q: But insects aren’t sentient, are they? They don’t feel pain... right?

A: As humans we have a natural tendency to ignore the pain of beings very different from ourselves. I think size has a big factor to play in this. If a cricket or butterfly were the size of a dog, you would hate to see a child pulling off its wings or piercing its legs. We would see the animal breathing, feeling with its antennae, flinching from pain.

Similarly, if we knew more about the mating practices of crickets, or about how they raise young and hide from predators, we might feel more sympathy for them. Much of our natural aversion to taking their suffering seriously comes from vibes. Therefore, we should think carefully before scaling up insect farms, and take welfare concerns seriously.

Q: But insects don’t feel pain? Or they feel pain way less strongly than we do?

A: We don’t know how strongly insects feel pain. Options:

• They might feel nothing. Although they do exhibit responses to pain [1] [2], as you know if you’ve ever pulled the wings off a butterfly.

• They might feel pain, but less vividly than humans. But what basis do we have for this? Do we think puppies, adult dogs, and babies feel pain less strongly than conscious adult humans? Or do we think all these groups feel pain approximately the same? Difficult to say.

• They might feel pain nearly as strongly as larger mammals or even humans.

Because of this uncertainty, we don’t know what the situation truly is. We might think it’s “probably fine,” but even if there’s a 1 in 10 chance that we’re wrong and insect pain is comparable to human pain, then scaling insect farming would be an enormous moral catastrophe.

Q: Why do you care about insect farming?

A: One reason is it’s a numbers game. To create a kilogram of protein from different animal sources, we should consider the number of minds involved.

Source of protein (10kg)Number of minds involvedCow0.04 (adult cow = 250kg usable meat)Pig0.12 (adult pig = 80kg usable meat)Hen10 (1kg meat per bird)Fish10-50 (depending on size)Shrimp330+ (super colossal shrimp is 30g)Black soldier fly larvae10,000+ minds

Each new mind introduced into an unnatural or potentially suffering lifestyle is a moral problem. When we are uncertain about all the factors involved, massively increasing the number of animals involved in farming could pose a larger moral issue than having suffering concentrated in fewer, larger animals.

Q: What are the considerations that make factory farming cause suffering?

A: Several factors make animals in factory farms suffer:

• Extreme heat or cold

• Absence of adequate food or water

• Overcrowding

• Unnatural conditions (e.g., no sunlight, concrete floors)

• Unaddressed medical issues (e.g., leg fractures in hens, “keel bone fractures”)

• Loneliness or other social issues

• Slaughter methods (e.g., suffocation, burning, crushing)

• Attacks from other animals (e.g., pigs nibbling each other’s tails)

• Procedures to make them more suitable for factory life:

  • Castration (pigs)

  • Eyestalk ablation (shrimp)

  • Teeth filing (pigs)

  • Beak cutting (hens)

  • Separation from young (dairy cows)

In summary, I think this area is very contentious and we should be afraid of making missteps when deciding how to reduce animal suffering.

Fellow veggies and vegans, thanks for thinking hard about such moral quandries.

Note: When engaging with this topic please avoid tribalism. This is an inherently uncertain field, and no one can be too sure of anything.