Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/âarthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
To me this sort of work seems to risk playing into the stereotype of the EA community as head-in-the-cloud philosophisers who care more about intellectualising than practical outcomes
Thanks for the question! This is something Iâve talked with people a lot about, so have a lot of thoughts on it â apologies for the long response in advance! Answering for myself, and not other people involved:
Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
I broadly donât buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldnât engage with them. To me, itâs much more unacceptable to think that something could be unacceptable just because we donât like the conclusion. We should pursue truth, and act according to what our best model of the world is.
Practical ideas have already emerged from this work, and been implemented. As with many animal welfare issues (e.g. insect welfare, wild animal welfare, etc), what people perceive as absurd isnât due to taking the animalsâ interest seriously, itâs due to utilitarianism being a particularly demanding moral philosophy. The idea of capturing a spider in a cup to take it outside being a good thing to do instead of killing it is a widely held belief.
The absurdity you sense all comes from the demandingness of specific ethical systems, so if youâre concerned about weird outcomes, Iâd probably look there instead. If your moral philosophy is demanding you only care about nematodes and you find that to be a problem, Iâd contend thatâs an issue with your moral philosophy, not an issue with thinking about nematodes.
I donât think EA would ever demand working on only one cause, or if it did, that seems like a bad formulation of EA.
Taking some insects and some other arthropods seriously does not imply taking nemotodes or demodex mites seriously as moral patients (or even consider those as remotely similar animals, though the mites are more complicated). An adult black soldier fly has ~1000x the neurons of a nemotode, and ~1/â1000th the neurons of a dog (though neurons shouldnât really be used this way). My understanding is that our last common ancestor with insects is something like 200 million years after our last common ancestor with nemotodes.
Iâm pretty sure Iâve taken this issue as seriously as anyone else in the EA world has for longer than almost anyone else, and Iâve never believed that anyone should think about nematode welfare ~at all. I think that roughly 0 EA resources should go to nematode welfare. I donât know anyone who thinks that the only causes that matter are nematode welfare or even insect welfare. This is not due to concerns about nematode being rejected out of hand. Itâs because the evidence for their subjective experience is much weaker.
Even if demodex mites can suffer, say, it might be really hard to do anything about that. That doesnât mean we shouldnât do anything about insect farming or other places where we can have impact.
I think the evidence for insect sentience is incredibly disheartening â I would like to live in a world in which I had a high degree of confidence that insects donât experience suffering. Instead, I live in one where it seems like a reasonable possibility.
It is the case that if insects suffer to a reasonable degree, and we take their suffering seriously, it probably implies incredibly significant things about what our relationship to the world ought to be like. Iâm unhappy about that, but it seems like something we should face head on, if the evidence suggests it is worth doing.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/âarthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
The insect farming industry takes this issue seriously, so seems perfectly reasonable for people concerned about animal welfare to do so too (e.g. the industry lobbying group in Europe had animal welfare guidelines well before anyone remotely connected to EA had engaged on this issue seriously).
Animal welfare based commitments based on insect welfare have been in place at retailers for years (e.g. Asos), and insect welfare is a discussion item at industry conferences, etc.
I think likely the single most impactful animal welfare campaign by number of animals impacted was insect-focused: this 2012 Starbucks cochineal campaign.
Iâll also note that this fund exclusively exists to fund scientific research, especially research targeting practical applications. I donât think philosophy, except work like the moral weight project that has direct relevance to developing and evaluating interventions, has much use for animal welfare work at all, and wouldnât personally be in favor of funding it.
I broadly donât buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldnât engage with them...
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. weâre not building factories or research institutes if weâre all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I donât think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we donât know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like âdonât torture very large numbers of insectsâ, but because we donât have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about âwhat is good or badâ for an animal or âwhat conditions they might find torturousâ, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
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.
Iâm curious what youâve been reading thatâs 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, theyâve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/âstress which is just doing the industryâs 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 donât 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, thereâs 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.
I havenât actually watched this talk, but itâs titled âHow can we know what is good for insects,â and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a speciesâ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics â for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.
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 âhead in the cloud philosophersâ seems misguided to me
Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than weâll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Donât 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 donât see being narrowed by further pondering.
Hi Henry. I think youâre 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 isnât fair.
Hereâs 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 thatâs likely to lead to instaneous death. However, we now know that grinding often does not kill instantaneously. So, insofar as insects matter, itâs important to specify the exact conditions where grinding does and doesnât leave animals mangled but still alive. Likewise, itâs important that advocates donât start pushing for practices that are intuitively better for animals but arenât actually better. Welfare science can prevent people from making mistaken recommendations. It can also help identify the best recommendations.
Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
You can also be morally uncertain about the moral weights of animals in other ways, although Iâve recently argued against it being very important here, so for me, itâs mostly attitudes towards risk and uncertainty/âambiguity and aggregation, and, of course, the particular probabilities and other numbers involved.
Iâm personally inclined to focus on arthropods using a decent share of my altruistic budget, but not most of it. Iâm fairly concerned about mites, but not specifically demodex mites. I donât care much about nematodes (which are not arthropods, and seem particularly unlikely to matter much to me).
The breadth of the confidence intervals in any animal suffering research, particularly once it moves away from vertebrates, makes me feel like this work wonât ever lead to any actionable conclusions beyond âtorturing things is bad, avoid if possibleâ, which we sort of knew from the start.
Just to clarify: the problem is that we donât know what is and isnât torture. Is freezing insects the humane way to kill themâor is it a slow and painful way for them to die? The default view among entomologists is the former, but there are lots of physiological considerations that point in the other direction. I think youâre assuming that we know a lot more than we do about how to improve the lives of insects on farms given the options available.
âSlowâ and âpainfulâ very different.
âSlowâ yes, you could study how long it takes for freezing to kill them or stop their neurons firing, though this doesnât seem like very useful information.
âPainfulâ is the key and the problem: I donât see any way toward quantifying how subjectively âpainfulâ something is for an insect and how much we should spend to avoid that pain, hence there will always be a stalemate when it comes to implementation.
Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/âarthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
To me this sort of work seems to risk playing into the stereotype of the EA community as head-in-the-cloud philosophisers who care more about intellectualising than practical outcomes
Thanks for the question! This is something Iâve talked with people a lot about, so have a lot of thoughts on it â apologies for the long response in advance! Answering for myself, and not other people involved:
I broadly donât buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldnât engage with them. To me, itâs much more unacceptable to think that something could be unacceptable just because we donât like the conclusion. We should pursue truth, and act according to what our best model of the world is.
Practical ideas have already emerged from this work, and been implemented. As with many animal welfare issues (e.g. insect welfare, wild animal welfare, etc), what people perceive as absurd isnât due to taking the animalsâ interest seriously, itâs due to utilitarianism being a particularly demanding moral philosophy. The idea of capturing a spider in a cup to take it outside being a good thing to do instead of killing it is a widely held belief.
The absurdity you sense all comes from the demandingness of specific ethical systems, so if youâre concerned about weird outcomes, Iâd probably look there instead. If your moral philosophy is demanding you only care about nematodes and you find that to be a problem, Iâd contend thatâs an issue with your moral philosophy, not an issue with thinking about nematodes.
I donât think EA would ever demand working on only one cause, or if it did, that seems like a bad formulation of EA.
Taking some insects and some other arthropods seriously does not imply taking nemotodes or demodex mites seriously as moral patients (or even consider those as remotely similar animals, though the mites are more complicated). An adult black soldier fly has ~1000x the neurons of a nemotode, and ~1/â1000th the neurons of a dog (though neurons shouldnât really be used this way). My understanding is that our last common ancestor with insects is something like 200 million years after our last common ancestor with nemotodes.
Iâm pretty sure Iâve taken this issue as seriously as anyone else in the EA world has for longer than almost anyone else, and Iâve never believed that anyone should think about nematode welfare ~at all. I think that roughly 0 EA resources should go to nematode welfare. I donât know anyone who thinks that the only causes that matter are nematode welfare or even insect welfare. This is not due to concerns about nematode being rejected out of hand. Itâs because the evidence for their subjective experience is much weaker.
Even if demodex mites can suffer, say, it might be really hard to do anything about that. That doesnât mean we shouldnât do anything about insect farming or other places where we can have impact.
I think the evidence for insect sentience is incredibly disheartening â I would like to live in a world in which I had a high degree of confidence that insects donât experience suffering. Instead, I live in one where it seems like a reasonable possibility.
It is the case that if insects suffer to a reasonable degree, and we take their suffering seriously, it probably implies incredibly significant things about what our relationship to the world ought to be like. Iâm unhappy about that, but it seems like something we should face head on, if the evidence suggests it is worth doing.
The insect farming industry takes this issue seriously, so seems perfectly reasonable for people concerned about animal welfare to do so too (e.g. the industry lobbying group in Europe had animal welfare guidelines well before anyone remotely connected to EA had engaged on this issue seriously).
Animal welfare based commitments based on insect welfare have been in place at retailers for years (e.g. Asos), and insect welfare is a discussion item at industry conferences, etc.
I think likely the single most impactful animal welfare campaign by number of animals impacted was insect-focused: this 2012 Starbucks cochineal campaign.
Iâll also note that this fund exclusively exists to fund scientific research, especially research targeting practical applications. I donât think philosophy, except work like the moral weight project that has direct relevance to developing and evaluating interventions, has much use for animal welfare work at all, and wouldnât personally be in favor of funding it.
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. weâre not building factories or research institutes if weâre all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I donât think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
[Iâm an unaffiliated amateur]
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we donât know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like âdonât torture very large numbers of insectsâ, but because we donât have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about âwhat is good or badâ for an animal or âwhat conditions they might find torturousâ, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
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.
Iâm curious what youâve been reading thatâs 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, theyâve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/âstress which is just doing the industryâs 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 donât 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, thereâs 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.
That makes sense!
Again, very much not an expert, but some examples that might qualify:
The work of Dr Amaya Albalat and her team at the University of Stirling. Crustaceans are so different from vertebrates that I think some of this is quite non-intuitive to me.
I havenât actually watched this talk, but itâs titled âHow can we know what is good for insects,â and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a speciesâ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics â for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.
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 âhead in the cloud philosophersâ seems misguided to me
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than weâll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Donât 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 donât see being narrowed by further pondering.
Hi Henry. I think youâre 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 isnât fair.
Hereâs 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 thatâs likely to lead to instaneous death. However, we now know that grinding often does not kill instantaneously. So, insofar as insects matter, itâs important to specify the exact conditions where grinding does and doesnât leave animals mangled but still alive. Likewise, itâs important that advocates donât start pushing for practices that are intuitively better for animals but arenât actually better. Welfare science can prevent people from making mistaken recommendations. It can also help identify the best recommendations.
(Not speaking for this group.)
Adding to what others have said already, you could also have moral/ânormative uncertainty about decision theory and aim to do well across multiple attitudes to risk and uncertainty/âambiguity, and some attitudes will prioritize animals that seem less likely to be conscious more or less than others, some possibly severely discounting invertebrates. You can also be morally uncertain about moral aggregation (by addition in particular, say), and then helping humans might look better on non-aggregative (or only partially aggregative) views.
You can also be morally uncertain about the moral weights of animals in other ways, although Iâve recently argued against it being very important here, so for me, itâs mostly attitudes towards risk and uncertainty/âambiguity and aggregation, and, of course, the particular probabilities and other numbers involved.
Iâm personally inclined to focus on arthropods using a decent share of my altruistic budget, but not most of it. Iâm fairly concerned about mites, but not specifically demodex mites. I donât care much about nematodes (which are not arthropods, and seem particularly unlikely to matter much to me).
I agree that the field is full of uncertainty.
The breadth of the confidence intervals in any animal suffering research, particularly once it moves away from vertebrates, makes me feel like this work wonât ever lead to any actionable conclusions beyond âtorturing things is bad, avoid if possibleâ, which we sort of knew from the start.
Just to clarify: the problem is that we donât know what is and isnât torture. Is freezing insects the humane way to kill themâor is it a slow and painful way for them to die? The default view among entomologists is the former, but there are lots of physiological considerations that point in the other direction. I think youâre assuming that we know a lot more than we do about how to improve the lives of insects on farms given the options available.
âSlowâ and âpainfulâ very different. âSlowâ yes, you could study how long it takes for freezing to kill them or stop their neurons firing, though this doesnât seem like very useful information. âPainfulâ is the key and the problem: I donât see any way toward quantifying how subjectively âpainfulâ something is for an insect and how much we should spend to avoid that pain, hence there will always be a stalemate when it comes to implementation.