The welfare of sentient organisms (those with the capacity for subjective experience, e.g., those with the ability to feel pain) deserves some moral consideration. Traditionally, insects have been excluded from moral consideration based on the assumption that they cannot feel pain. However, recent scientific evidence has challenged this idea.

While there is currently no scientific consensus, insects in some taxonomic orders meet many of the criteria that may provide some evidence of the experience of pain: they possess nociceptors; can integrate nociceptive information in higher-order brain regions; may modulate their responses to noxious stimuli in response to endogenous and/or exogenous chemicals with putative nociception-relevant roles; can learn, remember, and change their behavior in response to nociceptive information; may flexibly trade-off harmful and rewarding stimuli; and may respond with self-protective behaviors to injury. Further, some research suggests that insects may possess affective states (e.g., optimism, pessimism) that change their subsequent actions. Frameworks for understanding sentience, pain, and welfare, as well as the empirical evidence on these topics, are catalogued in our research database (provisional library found here, and see: Gibbons et al. 2022 for the most up-to-date review).

This evidence indicates that, minimally, more research on insect pain and sentience is urgently needed. Additionally, this evidence suggests that insect welfare deserves some consideration: moral caution recommends considering their welfare and minimizing unnecessary harm.  

Insects are managed in a variety of contexts where considerations of their welfare might affect policy or best practices: as ‘mini-livestock’ farmed for food and feed, in waste management, as agricultural pests or invasive species, in research and educational settings, for medical purposes, as targets of conservation actions, and more. As insects are extraordinarily diverse (5.5 million estimated species) and managed in a diverse array of settings that present variable welfare concerns, research must approach insect welfare from a perspective that considers: 1) species-specific biology; 2) developmental strategy; and 3) context (wild, farmed, research, etc.). Insect welfare considerations in these settings may vary significantly from vertebrates. Research and policy/practice considerations thus require thoughtful collaboration between entomologists, welfare scientists, stakeholders, ethicists, and management partners.