I appreciate you pushing back on the idea that insects live net-negative lives. However, when I opened my door to leave my apartment today, I crushed the legs of a bug that I didn’t know was by the hinge of the door. I saw it limping it away on the door. I didn’t kill it, but not sure that was the right decision.
I think these types of injuries are a stronger argument for wild animals living net-negative lives than violent deaths. (Though I am uncertain on the manner.)
Edit: A candidate for a net-positive insect life: “Because juvenile cicadas (known as “nymphs”) live underground, Yanega says that they “are probably almost never eaten by predators.” This is a potential indicator that periodical cicadas could have better welfare expectancy than many other insect species. Periodical cicadas spend 99.5% of their unusually long lives underground, enjoying an abundance of food and a relative lack of predators. It’s likely that predation becomes a serious threat only in the final few weeks of their lives, when they emerge and become adults.” Source: WAI
A predator would have known what to do and that is actually one reason I consider predation among the more merciful ways to die, provided you are not unlucky enough to be caught by a cat with time on its hands. Predators kill quickly. Insecticides and disease rarely do.
Having that said, I think you made the right call. Insects appear to be remarkably insensitive to mechanical injury, at least in any prolonged sense. They do not regrow limbs, but they do seal wounds efficiently and carry on. Feeling persistent pain in response to physical damage would arguably be maladaptive—and they give us little reason to believe they do. A rough human analogy might be internal injuries serious enough to be fatal, yet never consciously registered at all. Insects do, however, appear sensitive to heat and electric shocks—precisely the conditions they are subjected to during the killing process in insect farming.
There is also good evidence that insects experience something resembling mood. A well-known study found that agitated bees display negative cognitive biases. Responding to ambiguous stimuli as though expecting the worst in ways that parallel what we might cautiously call a pessimistic state. The original paper even used the word depression. Conversely, bees finding food appear to shift into something like a positive mood. So perhaps your bug was not in pain when it limped away — but if the research on bees is anything to go by, losing a leg is exactly the kind of thing that might tip an insect into a genuinely miserable state.
None of this settles the question of whether insects lead net positive or net negative lives. But the evidence cuts both ways. Their apparent insensitivity to mechanical injury might just as easily indicate that their lives are, moment to moment, quite good—unburdened by the anticipatory dread and chronic pain that weigh so heavily on human experience. The lives of honeybees, at least under natural conditions, seem rather enviable by any reasonable measure.
Predators kill quickly. Insecticides and disease rarely do.
Some predators swallow whole, so the death takes longer. But the bigger issues are probably disease and starvation, which generally take a long time and are common. So I think the average percent time of suffering of insects is much longer than your example, and probably than humans.
Thank you for pointing this out. I deliberately chose a single animal for the thought experiment because I didn’t want to argue that I know whether suffering makes up a large part of their lives, but rather that no one can know. That notwithstanding, apparently there are people out there who are contemplating killing billions of invertebrates for their own supposed benefit.
I appreciate you pushing back on the idea that insects live net-negative lives. However, when I opened my door to leave my apartment today, I crushed the legs of a bug that I didn’t know was by the hinge of the door. I saw it limping it away on the door. I didn’t kill it, but not sure that was the right decision.
I think these types of injuries are a stronger argument for wild animals living net-negative lives than violent deaths. (Though I am uncertain on the manner.)
Edit: A candidate for a net-positive insect life: “Because juvenile cicadas (known as “nymphs”) live underground, Yanega says that they “are probably almost never eaten by predators.” This is a potential indicator that periodical cicadas could have better welfare expectancy than many other insect species. Periodical cicadas spend 99.5% of their unusually long lives underground, enjoying an abundance of food and a relative lack of predators. It’s likely that predation becomes a serious threat only in the final few weeks of their lives, when they emerge and become adults.” Source: WAI
Some predators swallow whole, so the death takes longer. But the bigger issues are probably disease and starvation, which generally take a long time and are common. So I think the average percent time of suffering of insects is much longer than your example, and probably than humans.
Thank you for pointing this out. I deliberately chose a single animal for the thought experiment because I didn’t want to argue that I know whether suffering makes up a large part of their lives, but rather that no one can know. That notwithstanding, apparently there are people out there who are contemplating killing billions of invertebrates for their own supposed benefit.