My general position is that I expect insect farming to be even worse ethically than the factory farming of larger animals.
In expectation I agree, except maybe farming of chickens or small fish, which might be competitive with cricket and mealworm farming in terms of (sentience per animal)*(number of animals).
most insect farming operations feed crops to insects.
Yes, except some operations raising insects to feed to vertebrate farm animals rather than humans. (So much for displacing other types of factory farming...)
The conversion ratio of crop to insect meat is much better than it is for [other] types of meat
Lundy and Parrella (2015) say that farmed crickets had “little or no [protein conversion efficiency] PCE improvement compared to chicken”.
no good evidence that they should be a less painful way of killing these animals
I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen someone make this argument, but my best guess would be that freezing ectotherms should be less bad than freezing endotherms because an endotherm would maintain its body temperature for a while, while an ectotherm is more likely to “give up” and let the cold temperatures come. This seems more likely to be humane for very tiny creatures that can rapidly change temperature compared against, say, reptiles and amphibians. People say that freezing reptiles is inhumane.
There are unfortunately lots of dying bugs around my house, so I regrettably have a lot of experience freezing bugs to euthanize them. I find that a dying fly put in the freezer becomes completely motionless within ~half a minute. There are at least two possible explanations for this:
The cold temperatures slow down metabolic activity so that cells (including neurons) are mostly paused
The nervous system is still active but merely chooses to stop movement, perhaps to avoid bodily injury or something.
I hope the answer is #1 rather than #2, though I agree we don’t know much about this stuff. Freezing insects could be anywhere from almost painless (after the first few seconds) to extremely painful.
I avoid testing it out, but I would imagine that if you put a bug in the freezer and took it out a minute or two later, it would come back to being active again. The freezing temperatures probably just put it “on pause” rather than killing it quickly. I don’t know how long it takes freezing temperatures to actually kill a bug (and it may vary a lot from one species to the next).
Thanks! Hopefully it’s not too derivative of your work. I want to look into this more in the future and hopefully be able to say some more novel and insightful things.
I mainly relied on the FAO sourcebook on edible insects which claims higher efficiency for crickets. It seems like most articles on the subject claim higher efficiency, but I haven’t looked into it deeply enough to be able to determine that. I should probably have just relied on your article on that subject.
Yeah, I’m not sure about freezing. I mostly think we just don’t know enough about it and the Wikipedia page seems pretty sceptical about freezing as a method of killing.
Sometimes when it’s cold and I’m trying to sleep (like when I’m camping) I will manage a sort of sleep state, but one where I’m still feeling an unpleasant amount of cold. I guess I imagine that an insect’s response to freezing could be like that for some portion of the time.
I guess it wouldn’t make sense for the nervous system to send “avoid this” messages to the animal while the animal wasn’t able to avoid the situation because it was too cold, but the nervous system can’t get everything right in all circumstances.
It seems like most articles on the subject claim higher efficiency
Yeah. :) I was just offering one more data point. In the Table 3 screenshot in the link I gave above, it’s carp rather than chicken that are most competitive with crickets in terms of feed conversion.
the Wikipedia page seems pretty sceptical about freezing as a method of killing
I wrote that page, so it’s not an independent source :) (although the citations within it are).
wouldn’t make sense for the nervous system to send “avoid this” messages to the animal while the animal wasn’t able to avoid the situation
It could still make sense in terms of creating a bad experience that makes the animal try harder to avoid such a situation next time (if there is a next time).
Great post!
In expectation I agree, except maybe farming of chickens or small fish, which might be competitive with cricket and mealworm farming in terms of (sentience per animal)*(number of animals).
Yes, except some operations raising insects to feed to vertebrate farm animals rather than humans. (So much for displacing other types of factory farming...)
Lundy and Parrella (2015) say that farmed crickets had “little or no [protein conversion efficiency] PCE improvement compared to chicken”.
I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen someone make this argument, but my best guess would be that freezing ectotherms should be less bad than freezing endotherms because an endotherm would maintain its body temperature for a while, while an ectotherm is more likely to “give up” and let the cold temperatures come. This seems more likely to be humane for very tiny creatures that can rapidly change temperature compared against, say, reptiles and amphibians. People say that freezing reptiles is inhumane.
There are unfortunately lots of dying bugs around my house, so I regrettably have a lot of experience freezing bugs to euthanize them. I find that a dying fly put in the freezer becomes completely motionless within ~half a minute. There are at least two possible explanations for this:
The cold temperatures slow down metabolic activity so that cells (including neurons) are mostly paused
The nervous system is still active but merely chooses to stop movement, perhaps to avoid bodily injury or something.
I hope the answer is #1 rather than #2, though I agree we don’t know much about this stuff. Freezing insects could be anywhere from almost painless (after the first few seconds) to extremely painful.
I avoid testing it out, but I would imagine that if you put a bug in the freezer and took it out a minute or two later, it would come back to being active again. The freezing temperatures probably just put it “on pause” rather than killing it quickly. I don’t know how long it takes freezing temperatures to actually kill a bug (and it may vary a lot from one species to the next).
Thanks! Hopefully it’s not too derivative of your work. I want to look into this more in the future and hopefully be able to say some more novel and insightful things.
I mainly relied on the FAO sourcebook on edible insects which claims higher efficiency for crickets. It seems like most articles on the subject claim higher efficiency, but I haven’t looked into it deeply enough to be able to determine that. I should probably have just relied on your article on that subject.
Yeah, I’m not sure about freezing. I mostly think we just don’t know enough about it and the Wikipedia page seems pretty sceptical about freezing as a method of killing.
Sometimes when it’s cold and I’m trying to sleep (like when I’m camping) I will manage a sort of sleep state, but one where I’m still feeling an unpleasant amount of cold. I guess I imagine that an insect’s response to freezing could be like that for some portion of the time.
I guess it wouldn’t make sense for the nervous system to send “avoid this” messages to the animal while the animal wasn’t able to avoid the situation because it was too cold, but the nervous system can’t get everything right in all circumstances.
Yeah. :) I was just offering one more data point. In the Table 3 screenshot in the link I gave above, it’s carp rather than chicken that are most competitive with crickets in terms of feed conversion.
I wrote that page, so it’s not an independent source :) (although the citations within it are).
It could still make sense in terms of creating a bad experience that makes the animal try harder to avoid such a situation next time (if there is a next time).
Haha, oh, I didn’t know you wrote that page :) That’s good enough for the future.