Publication Alert: Farmed cricket welfare (A. domesticus, G. assimilis, G. sigillatus)
Farmed cricket (Acheta domesticus, Gryllus assimilis, and Gryllodes sigillatus; Orthoptera) welfare considerations: recommendations for improving global practice (Rowe et al. 2024; Journal of Insects as Food and Feed)
Acknowledgement of Funding and Conflicts of Interest: Rethink Priorities provided funding to all authors for the researching, writing, and/or editing of this work. Elizabeth Rowe and Meghan Barrett report a relationship with Rethink Priorities that includes: consulting or advisory.
Led by Dr. Lizzie Rowe, an animal welfare scientist at University of Reading, UK, the Barrett lab (at IUI) and Baudier lab (at University of Southern Mississippi) collaborated to produce recommendations for improving the welfare of three species of farmed crickets. The insects as food and feed industry already rears approximately 400 billion orthopterans a year and continues to grow; improving the welfare of these novel mini-livestock is important to the economic viability and social license to operate of the industry.
“The IAFF industry is expected to grow substantially in the coming decades, and thus represents one of the largest ever undertakings of industrial livestock rearing in terms of the number of individual animals. Despite some uncertainty about insect sentience, recent literature suggests insect sentience is plausible, and therefore many academics, consumers, producers, and professional societies have expressed an interest in the welfare of insects...”
The report uses the five domains welfare framework to assess current industry rearing practices. It details 15 current welfare concerns related to stocking density, nutrition, slaughter, disease, and more (see Table 4 from the publication below), alongside species-specific recommendations for improving those concerns based on the best available data. We conclude by highlighting future research directions for the field of cricket welfare for scientists interested in tackling important questions in this emerging field.
