Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Inform and lobby the insect farming industry to protect these welfare requirements (eg corporate campaigns); do this in a similar way to how decapod welfare research has informed the work of the Shrimp Welfare Project
Understand the impacts of pesticides on insect welfare, and use this to lobby for pesticide substitutes
Improve the evidence base of insect sentience such that they can be incorporated into law (although I think the evidence is probably at least as strong as decapods which are already seen as sentient under UK Law).
Insect suffering is here now and real, and there is a lot of practical things we could do about it; dismissing it as ‘head in the cloud philosophers’ seems misguided to me
Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than we’ll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Don’t need a 20-page report to justify that.
The part where we try to quantify suffering is hampered by the massive confidence intervals that are inherent to any discussion of insect suffering, and which I don’t see being narrowed by further pondering.
Hi Henry. I think you’re running together the Moral Weight Project, where your criticism about wide confidence intervals is fair, and the kind of empirical work that welfare scientists do, where that criticism isn’t fair.
Here’s a concrete example of what welfare science can do. We might have thought that the most humane way to kill insects is by grinding them, as that’s likely to lead to instaneous death. However, we now know that grinding often does not kill instantaneously. So, insofar as insects matter, it’s important to specify the exact conditions where grinding does and doesn’t leave animals mangled but still alive. Likewise, it’s important that advocates don’t start pushing for practices that are intuitively better for animals but aren’t actually better. Welfare science can prevent people from making mistaken recommendations. It can also help identify the best recommendations.
Some useful practical ideas that could emerge:
Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Inform and lobby the insect farming industry to protect these welfare requirements (eg corporate campaigns); do this in a similar way to how decapod welfare research has informed the work of the Shrimp Welfare Project
Understand the impacts of pesticides on insect welfare, and use this to lobby for pesticide substitutes
Improve the evidence base of insect sentience such that they can be incorporated into law (although I think the evidence is probably at least as strong as decapods which are already seen as sentient under UK Law).
Insect suffering is here now and real, and there is a lot of practical things we could do about it; dismissing it as ‘head in the cloud philosophers’ seems misguided to me
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than we’ll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Don’t need a 20-page report to justify that.
The part where we try to quantify suffering is hampered by the massive confidence intervals that are inherent to any discussion of insect suffering, and which I don’t see being narrowed by further pondering.
Hi Henry. I think you’re running together the Moral Weight Project, where your criticism about wide confidence intervals is fair, and the kind of empirical work that welfare scientists do, where that criticism isn’t fair.
Here’s a concrete example of what welfare science can do. We might have thought that the most humane way to kill insects is by grinding them, as that’s likely to lead to instaneous death. However, we now know that grinding often does not kill instantaneously. So, insofar as insects matter, it’s important to specify the exact conditions where grinding does and doesn’t leave animals mangled but still alive. Likewise, it’s important that advocates don’t start pushing for practices that are intuitively better for animals but aren’t actually better. Welfare science can prevent people from making mistaken recommendations. It can also help identify the best recommendations.