“When there are welfare concerns, we need to intervene at the planning stage when those facilities are designed and built,” said Bob Fisher, a professor of insect welfare at Texas State University. There are many factors that farm designers must consider. For example, temperature, humidity levels, lighting, insect density, and what insects eat. For insect farmers, these are all engineering issues, wanting to keep as many insects alive as possible and keep farms running cheaply, but are intricately linked to animal welfare.
There is good news here. Fotis Fotiadis, the founder of Better Origin, an insect farming startup based in Cambridge, UK, says some insect larvae seem to prefer living in crowded environments. He rents out containers with trays, where farmers can grow their own black sandfly larvae. “What we think is high welfare for animals may not be high welfare for insects. increase.
The problem is that we have a very limited understanding of what insects want to do. The larvae of black black flies may prefer crowded environments, but what about adults? Chitka recalls visiting a facility. Adult black black flies were reared in crowded conditions without food. “It looked strange to me,” says Titka. Some insect farms, such as Better Origin, do not feed the adult black worms used to breed their larvae, but recent studies show that adult females live longer and are more fragrant when fed. It is suggested that they lay many eggs. “Letting adults to spawn and die is a current trend in the industry, as in other animal industries, and may remain the same until there are market opportunities for more welfare insects. It’s expensive,” Photiadis says.
An even bigger problem is how the insects are slaughtered. In the EU, most animals must be stunned and stunned before being killed, but there are no such regulations for insects. Bugs can be microwaved, steamed, boiled, roasted, frozen or minced. increase. Beyond the general feeling that a quick death is better than a prolonged death, it is not known which slaughter method is the least painful for the insect. Trying to make sure we’re killing is probably one of the most important things we can do,” Fisher says.
The question for Fischer is not whether we should farm insects, but whether we should take insect welfare more seriously and make the industry do the same. It’s growing, it’s not going to collapse in the next 10 years, ”he says. And the numbers we’re talking about are so vast that even modest improvements in welfare standards can make a difference in the lives of trillions of sentient beings. Rather than splitting into camps that want to do more, I hope that animal sensory researchers and the insect farming industry can get together and discuss what more welfare insect farming could look like.
And that means two things. The first is to advance research into animal senses, especially the few most commonly farmed species. “We want to have some certainty about what constitutes a humane slaughter procedure, acceptable rearing conditions, etc., at least for these insect species,” says Titka. We need research.”
It is also about expanding our sense of which animals deserve our compassion. It is much more difficult to look at a tray of mealworms and make the same observation. This may be the case.
