Bob Fischer: The case for including insects in our animal advocacy
Apr 9, 2024
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Guest Bob Fischer discusses the moral case for considering insect welfare, challenges in measuring insect pain, the rise of insect farming for protein production, welfare concerns in insect slaughter, and the importance of advocating for insect well-being despite their size or perceived intelligence. The podcast explores societal attitudes towards insects, sanctuary workers' impact, insect sentience, and the need for more research and awareness in the animal advocacy movement.
Our perceptions of insects are influenced by factors like size, threat potential, and dispensability, highlighting biases and challenges in empathizing with them individually.
Research on insect behaviors suggests they may experience suffering, emphasizing the need for addressing their welfare amidst increasing industry demands.
Balancing the rise of insect farming for protein with ethical considerations poses challenges in ensuring the well-being of insects, requiring attention to high welfare production practices.
Deep dives
Insects' Individuality and Sympathy
In a thought-provoking discussion, the podcast highlights how our response to insects is influenced by factors like their size, threat potential, and perceived dispensability. By imagining insects like Bumblebees as rare, large, and harmless beings, the question arises of why we struggle to sympathize with them on an individual level. This lack of immediate connection to insects, compared to other animals, sheds light on our biases and challenges in recognizing their unique traits and value.
Insects' Sentience and Welfare
Delving into questions of insect sentience and welfare, the episode explores the complex issue of determining whether insects can feel pain. Highlighting research on insect behaviors like wound tending, tool use, and social recognition, the conversation underscores the diverse capabilities of insects. Despite challenges in assessing their welfare due to their size and behaviors, evidence suggests that insects may experience suffering, emphasizing the need to address their welfare in the face of increasing industry demands.
Scale and Impact of Insect Farming
Focusing on the rise of insect farming driven by the escalating demand for protein, the podcast reflects on the ethical implications of scaling insect production for animal feed. With estimates projecting the farming of trillions of insects annually, concerns about welfare, overcrowding, and humane slaughter methods come to the forefront. As the industry continues to expand rapidly, balancing the demand for protein with ethical considerations poses significant challenges in ensuring the well-being of insects within the farming system.
Challenges in Advocating for Animal Welfare Standards
Advocating for animal welfare standards presents challenges, especially in getting the public to care about the welfare of animals used as feed for the animals they consume. The industry's success in addressing welfare issues relies on public support, which currently seems daunting due to societal perceptions about insects and other overlooked animals. Despite economic pressures and historical lack of focus on insect welfare, there is potential for high welfare production practices to mitigate welfare issues and prevent ethical dilemmas in the industry.
Limited Focus on Insect Welfare and the Importance of Research and Collaboration
Efforts to improve insect welfare face minimal resources and a small community of researchers globally. While the industry is expanding worldwide, there is a notable lack of emphasis on insect welfare in animal advocacy. Valuable opportunities exist for research, particularly in understanding insect sentience and implementing high welfare production practices. Collaboration, research, and resource allocation are critical to addressing welfare concerns and shaping the future of insect-related industries.
Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.
Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.
We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we’ll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.
Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn’t speak much about it today, so we’ll link it for interested folks.
Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:
Research paper, “Can Insects Feel Pain?”, which found that two orders of insects (which include cockroaches, termites, flies and mosquitos) met more criteria to feel pain than decapod crustaceans (e.g. crabs, lobsters, shrimp), which are recognised as sentient by the UK government.
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