“If there are welfare issues, you’ve obtained to intervene on the planning levels, when these services are being designed and constructed,” says Bob Fischer, a professor at Texas State College who works on insect welfare. There are a lot of elements that farm designers must consider, together with temperature, moisture ranges, lighting, how crowded the bugs are, and what they eat. For insect farmers, these are all engineering issues—they need to make sure that as many bugs survive as potential and that the farms are low cost to run—however they’re additionally intricately tied to animal welfare.

There’s some excellent news right here. Some insect larvae appear to love residing in crowded situations, says Fotis Fotiadis, founding father of the insect-farming startup Higher Origin, which relies in Cambridge within the UK. He rents out containers fitted with trays the place farmers can develop their very own black soldier fly larvae, squeezed in 10,000 to a tray in darkish, moist situations. “What we expect is excessive welfare for animals won’t be excessive welfare for bugs. We have to have a brand new understanding about what bugs need to do,” says Fotiadis.

The rub is that we’ve solely a really restricted understanding of what bugs love to do. Black soldier fly larvae would possibly like crowded situations, however what about adults? Chittka remembers visiting one facility the place grownup black soldier flies have been saved with out meals and in crowded situations. “It appeared unusual to me,” Chittka says. Some insect farms—like Better Origin—don’t feed grownup black soldier flies which are used to breed larvae, however latest analysis means that female adults reside longer and lay extra eggs in the event that they’re fed. “Letting the adults lay their eggs and move away is presently what the trade tends to do, according to different animal industries, and can probably stay the established order till there’s a market alternative for a better welfare insect,” says Fotiadis.

A fair larger quandary is how bugs must be slaughtered. Within the EU, most animals must be surprised unconscious earlier than they’re killed, however no such laws exist for bugs. Bugs will be microwaved, steamed, boiled, roasted, frozen, or minced to dying. Higher Origin’s larvae are fed alive to farmed chickens. We do not know which methodology of slaughter is least painful for bugs, past a basic sense {that a} fast dying is best than a protracted one. “Making an attempt to guarantee that we’re killing shortly and effectively, given the extent of uncertainty, is maybe one of the crucial vital issues we will do,” Fischer says.

The difficulty for Fischer isn’t whether or not we should always farm bugs in any respect—it’s about taking insect welfare extra severely and ensuring the trade does too. “Bugs as meals and feed is going on. It’s rising. It’s not going to break down within the subsequent 10 years,” he says. And the numbers we’re speaking about are so huge that even a small enchancment in welfare requirements might make a distinction to the lives of trillions of maybe-sentient creatures. That’s why Fischer hopes that quite than splitting off into opposing camps, animal sentience researchers and the insect-farming trade can get collectively and hash out what higher-welfare insect farming would possibly appear like.

And meaning two issues. One, it’s about extra work on animal sentience—specifically the handful of species which are mostly farmed. “For not less than these insect species, we might need to have some certainty of what constitutes humane slaughtering procedures and what are acceptable rearing situations and so forth,” says Chittka. “We’d like that analysis now.”

It’s additionally about widening our sense of which animals deserve our compassion. It’s straightforward to look into the eyes of a canine, or a chimp, and intuit that these animals have emotions that we will affect. It’s way more troublesome to look upon a tray of mealworms and make the identical statement. If we’re going to start out farming these animals en masse, although, the kindest factor to do is perhaps to err on the aspect of warning.