Thanks for flagging this concern! I’d share it if insect farming had existed as a substitute for the factory farming of other animals. However, in practice, insect farming tries (and mostly fails) to substitute for:
Soybean meal (which causes some suffering through crop clearing, pesticides, etc—but insects in farms are also fed crops)
Fishmeal (the impact on animal suffering of fishing is unclear)
Pet food (among the lowest expected-suffering-footprint animal product, since it mostly comes from byproducts of large animals)
Though I understand that we don’t have the same views on insect suffering, I think that none of the three sources of food above cause much higher expected suffering than factory farm conditions for insects (again, I’d be much more uncertain if insect farming substituted for broiler chicken farming).
My current view on insects is that in the face of some indications of nociception / sentience-adjacent traits, these animals suffering significantly doesn’t seem astronomically less likely than dogs or birds suffering. So to me, the pain of a trillion insects doesn’t seem less in expectation that that of ten billion chickens or 500 million cows, though I have no confidence in more precise comparisons (so I’m not saying “obviously insect farming is worse than chicken farming”).
That seems very sad. Insect farming seems much lower suffering in-expectation.
Thanks for flagging this concern! I’d share it if insect farming had existed as a substitute for the factory farming of other animals. However, in practice, insect farming tries (and mostly fails) to substitute for:
Soybean meal (which causes some suffering through crop clearing, pesticides, etc—but insects in farms are also fed crops)
Fishmeal (the impact on animal suffering of fishing is unclear)
Pet food (among the lowest expected-suffering-footprint animal product, since it mostly comes from byproducts of large animals)
Though I understand that we don’t have the same views on insect suffering, I think that none of the three sources of food above cause much higher expected suffering than factory farm conditions for insects (again, I’d be much more uncertain if insect farming substituted for broiler chicken farming).
My current view on insects is that in the face of some indications of nociception / sentience-adjacent traits, these animals suffering significantly doesn’t seem astronomically less likely than dogs or birds suffering. So to me, the pain of a trillion insects doesn’t seem less in expectation that that of ten billion chickens or 500 million cows, though I have no confidence in more precise comparisons (so I’m not saying “obviously insect farming is worse than chicken farming”).