Executive summary: The post provides a primer on insect sentience and welfare, aimed at helping readers get acquainted with the key scientific evidence, history, scale, and open questions regarding insects’ capacity for suffering.
Key points:
Insects may have moral significance due to their sentience and capacity for welfare, but this field is poorly understood and full of empirically-unsupported assumptions.
A lot of work is being done to understand insect nervous systems, behavior, and physiology to improve their welfare.
The post includes an extensive list of resources for understanding insect pain, sentience, and welfare, including academic papers, forum posts, and books.
The resources are categorized into topics such as insect sentience and capacity for welfare, history of the discussion, insect welfare cause area and scope, species-specific farmed insect welfare concerns, wild insect welfare concerns, and resources for continuing education.
The author notes some biases in the list, including a focus on biological information, a skew towards the author’s own work and collaborators, and a lack of regular updates.
The post ends with an invitation to follow the author’s lab work on farmed insect welfare and neurobiology starting in January 2024.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The post provides a primer on insect sentience and welfare, aimed at helping readers get acquainted with the key scientific evidence, history, scale, and open questions regarding insects’ capacity for suffering.
Key points:
Insects may have moral significance due to their sentience and capacity for welfare, but this field is poorly understood and full of empirically-unsupported assumptions.
A lot of work is being done to understand insect nervous systems, behavior, and physiology to improve their welfare.
The post includes an extensive list of resources for understanding insect pain, sentience, and welfare, including academic papers, forum posts, and books.
The resources are categorized into topics such as insect sentience and capacity for welfare, history of the discussion, insect welfare cause area and scope, species-specific farmed insect welfare concerns, wild insect welfare concerns, and resources for continuing education.
The author notes some biases in the list, including a focus on biological information, a skew towards the author’s own work and collaborators, and a lack of regular updates.
The post ends with an invitation to follow the author’s lab work on farmed insect welfare and neurobiology starting in January 2024.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.