Thank you Bob, Daniela and Abraham for this initiative! I hope you will succeed in raising the necessary funds.
A little anecdote to illustrate just how useful I think your work would be: For one of my forthcoming papers addressing the issue of insect farming, I had the opportunity to realise how few studies there are on the question of insect welfare, particularly in a farming context. The studies on the sentience or well-being of insects that exist to date have almost never looked at insects specifically used for food or feed (notably the black soldier fly and, to a lesser extent, the tenebrio molitor.) Similarly, there is very little data on what constitutes good or bad rearing conditions for the insects used and the least harmful ways of killing them, particularly in the light of the practices currently favoured by the industry. tl;dr: I strongly agree there’s a huge data gap that would be extremely useful to address in an attempt to bring this issue to the attention of decision-makers.
Thank you Bob, Daniela and Abraham for this initiative! I hope you will succeed in raising the necessary funds.
A little anecdote to illustrate just how useful I think your work would be: For one of my forthcoming papers addressing the issue of insect farming, I had the opportunity to realise how few studies there are on the question of insect welfare, particularly in a farming context. The studies on the sentience or well-being of insects that exist to date have almost never looked at insects specifically used for food or feed (notably the black soldier fly and, to a lesser extent, the tenebrio molitor.) Similarly, there is very little data on what constitutes good or bad rearing conditions for the insects used and the least harmful ways of killing them, particularly in the light of the practices currently favoured by the industry.
tl;dr: I strongly agree there’s a huge data gap that would be extremely useful to address in an attempt to bring this issue to the attention of decision-makers.