My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.