We have animal rights for pets and livestock – why not insects?

The question of whether a fly or a cricket has rights that humans should respect probably sounds like a First-World problem. One would have said the same about the rights of dogs or cattle in the past, yet today animal cruelty laws are widely supported and animal welfare is a concern for farmers and meat eaters alike. Should these concerns extend to invertebrates?

Welfare ethics, enshrined as laws in many countries, demand that farmed animals be kept in good conditions that minimise suffering, and that slaughter be as swift and as painless as possible.

However, the intensive agriculture needed to produce enough animals for a growing population that demands more meat in its diet than before has a large range of negative effects on animals, as well as the environment.

One of the proposed solutions is the farming of insects, which are certainly more environmentally friendly than farmed vertebrates as they require less feed, water or land to produce the same amount of protein, and lead to less climate-warming greenhouse gases.

Insects are also widely seen as being less conscious than vertebrates – less likely to experience pain as a negative emotion, if they even have emotions.

A growing number of vegetarians and even some vegans, or "entovegans," are open to consuming insects on the basis that they cannot suffer, similar to "ostrovegans" who have no problem eating brainless bivalves like oysters and clams, which definitively have no consciousness.

Unlike bivalves, however, insects do have brains, and experiments with bees show that they are able to learn, have spatial awareness, and may even have personality traits like risk aversion or novelty seeking. The extent of insect consciousness is hard to determine, in part because scientists cannot quite agree on what consciousness actually is.

For insects reared for research purposes, a precautionary principle is applied, in which one acts as if insects can feel pain and treats them accordingly. That's a simple matter in a laboratory rearing a few dozen fruit flies, but the scale of insect farms is much greater.

Increased attention to insects as eco-friendly proteins has led to a surge in global demand, along with the development of new techniques to rear insects like crickets, locusts, mealworms and palm weevil larvae at industrial levels. Those insects are farmed for use as human food, while others like the black soldier fly are reared primarily as animal feed, to replace relatively expensive fishmeal or soymeal ingredients.

Researchers in 2020 estimated that more than one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) individual insects are currently farmed as food or feed, with that number expected to pass 8 trillion by 2030. By comparison, the global population of farmed mammals and birds is less than 80 billion. Even if there is a one-in-a-million chance that insects are conscious and can suffer pain, multiply that by a trillion and the total amount of potential suffering is significant.

Does anybody really care about this? A survey of commercial insect farmers in the UK, which has had a relatively favourable attitude to edible insects compared to much of Europe, found that most were concerned with the welfare of their mini-livestock and with providing them with a "good death."

Consumers in the West also seem concerned that the insects they eat are slaughtered humanely, with the traditional methods of tossing insects alive into hot oil or boiling water falling out of favour. Current opinions vary, with most consumers believing freezing the cold-blooded insects until they fall asleep and die is the kindest method, while entomologists suggest that instantaneously shredding the insects with a high-speed grinder is the best way to dispatch large numbers quickly and relatively kindly.

Insects are not the only invertebrates whose welfare is on peoples' minds. Cephalopods like octopuses and squids are considered likely to be sentient, and this conclusion was reflected in the 2021 announcement by the UK government that cephalopods and decapods (crustaceans like crabs and lobsters) should be protected under animal welfare guidelines along with vertebrates.

Evolutionarily, insects are more closely related to decapods than to other land invertebrates like spiders or centipedes, and so it would not be a stretch to extend the definition of sentient organisms to include them.

Beyond consumer opinions, the question of farmed animal welfare can have important implications on safety and public health. Livestock kept in unsanitary, crowded conditions not only suffer, but also are more likely to get sick and harbour pathogens that can then contaminate the meat, farmers, or environment.

Many human diseases have their origins in animals bred and slaughtered for food, from salmonellosis to anthrax to – depending on who you ask – Covid-19. Conditions that ensure animals are healthy with plenty of space to express natural behaviours should reduce the risk of diseases while simultaneously improving their welfare. What works for cows does not necessarily work for all life stages of all insects, however, especially those that naturally thrive in what we vertebrates would consider unsanitary, crowded conditions.

That insects are so relatively easy to please is an argument in favour of farming them, especially as life for a farmed insect is probably a lot less stressful than life for a wild insect contending with uncertain food supplies and predators everywhere. If insect farming could reduce demand for vertebrate meat, the benefits stack further.

Of course, as plants are absolutely not sentient, the fully vegan diet still wins for sustainability and low cruelty. Low, but not zero: many insects are unavoidably killed in the production of plants through the use of pesticides or biocontrol predators, and vertebrates too will die under ploughing and harvesting machines.

The National