I’m into insect welfare! What’s next?
The Barrett lab is deeply appreciative of recent interest in our work. We’re glad to be developing tools and a knowledge base that can help resolve key uncertainties about insects, their lives, and their plausible welfare, wherever they are found.
For those feeling inspired to help insects, we want to suggest some paths forward based on your circumstances. Here are some thoughts: 1) for everyone; 2) for those in a position to support insect welfare science; and 3) for those interested in insect welfare research.
Learning and Doing, Whoever You Are
Let’s begin with four things that anyone can do for insects.
1. Become more knowledgeable about, and appreciative of, insects.
Misconceptions about insects abound. Moreover, a lack of knowledge about insects and the proxies that inform us about animal sentience, as well as uninformed intuitions, can cause people to dismiss insects without considering the evidence that’s currently available.
You can become more knowledgeable about insects by reading the works listed on this ‘primer’ page I created about insect sentience and welfare, my own lab’s work, and the peer-reviewed works accumulated in the Insect Welfare Society Research (IWRS) research library. Further educational opportunities are available through the IWRS monthly newsletter, which highlights recent advances in the field, and the virtual IWRS bi-monthly research seminar series, with many previous seminars available on our YouTube channel. You might also enjoy my recent appearance on the 80K podcast or this preprint of a book chapter I’ve written on Insects for Musk and Clutton’s 2024 book on Pain and Suffering in Farmed Animals: First Steps Towards Better Understanding and Management.
Finally, you can become more appreciative of insects in your own life. Watch them up close. How do they move? What do they see? What are they responding to? What activities do they engage in? How do they differ in each respect from other species you’ve observed? How are they similar? (my praying mantises engage in grooming behaviors that remind me almost exactly of my cats after a meal!) Do these activities seem to benefit other animals, you, or the ecosystem—or not? Take a photo and post it to iNaturalist where you can get an expert ID. Give yourself some time and space to learn through observation.
2. Consider changing how you care for insects in your life.
For most people, the way they interact with insects is in their homes and gardens. So, consider ways you can support insects and their welfare. This may be through more humane killing (e.g., crushing a bug instead of letting it slowly die on the sidewalk), using more humane insecticides, removing insects from your home instead of killing them, or by providing resources that support wild insect health. In all cases, be sure to thoroughly research your solutions to make the most evidence-based decisions you can about improving insect lives.
3. Start empirically-informed dialogues about insect welfare within your local community.
Starting local dialogues (your research group or department, your scientific society, your company, your local zoo, your school district, etc.) can be the best way to begin improving insect lives. Given how few large-scale solutions have been researched to improve insect welfare, conversations at the local level are likely to be the best at identifying tractable solutions and resources to improve insect lives now. Plus, this is a great way to inform more people about all they didn’t know about insects, challenging others’ assumptions in an effective way.
4. Be open to disagreement as you think critically about trade-offs and uncertainty.
Factoring insects into our ethical calculations can add a lot of uncertainty about what to do! Disagreeing respectfully with others while striving to find ethical compromises that address everyone’s values is essential to making progress for insects.
In many cases, we must recognize that serious trade-offs between the welfare of insects and the welfare of other animals (human and non-human alike) are inevitable given modern infrastructure. Some obvious examples arise when considering the use of pesticides in cropland to feed humans around the world (not to mention the need to investigate mechanisms for reducing or eliminating malaria-carrying mosquito populations to prevent devastating human diseases). Pretending that these trade-offs are not real does the field of insect welfare a disservice by not taking seriously the constraints of modern society and the evidence-based impacts of insects on the welfare of other animals, humans included.
While we may not always be able to eliminate insect suffering, or we may often feel the cost of prioritizing reductions in possible insect suffering is too high (financially, time/labor, to society, to other animals, etc.), the difficulty of improving insect lives in some cases also does not excuse us from considering more ethical choices at all. In many cases, the costs are low to improving an insect’s life—and, in these cases, we should consider improving our practice. Further, while there may be practical limitations to our ability to improve insect welfare now, this does not excuse us from our responsibility to continue to investigate cost-effective, practical solutions to insect suffering that could be implemented in the future.
For more on how to act in cases of uncertainty, I recommend checking out The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch (and the podcast episode here).
Support Empirical Research on Insect Welfare
The field of insect welfare science is just beginning. There are few funders, few scientists with the requisite skills, and lots of open and important empirical questions to answer. Science is expensive and requires expertise. Labs can only work on what they can fund. A scientific field can only grow as fast as the people within it can be trained.
You can be a part of the solution by supporting organizations aimed at 1) identifying and funding high-impact, tractable, and effective invertebrate welfare research; and 2) training the next generation of insect welfare scientists. Two organizations are currently focused on these initiatives, exclusively in invertebrates:
Arthropoda Foundation. The mission of the Arthropoda Foundation is to support research that can inform advocacy on the most pressing problems facing arthropods. In particular, it prioritizes foundational research that has yet to be explored by traditional funding bodies, thereby increasing its impact for the organisms in Phylum Arthropoda.
Insect Welfare Research Society. The mission of the IWRS is to support the global scientific and academic community interested in insect welfare by connecting people, resources, and research. It brings researchers and other stakeholders together, encourages new collaborations that can inform policy and practice, and disseminates evidence-based information on insect welfare. (COI: I am currently Director of the IWRS, an unpaid service position.)
Arthropoda is more interested in effectively funding larger research projects in specific labs. The IWRS is more interested in training and field-building, alongside funding small research projects for students. Finally, Wild Animal Initiative is also known to fund larger research projects on insect welfare in the wild, alongside their portfolio of wild vertebrate research.
Become an Insect Welfare Scientist!
Do you have a background in animal welfare science or entomology (especially physiology, behavior, and neuroscience)? Then you may be a good candidate for building the field of insect welfare through your own body of work! You may be able to commit to small projects aimed at improving your own lab’s practices (e.g., developing and publishing standardized anesthetic protocols) or develop a collaborative project that extends your ‘traditional’ research program into the field of welfare science or insects. Alongside the aforementioned organizations that might be able to fund your project (Arthropoda, IWRS, WAI), you can find other possible small funders for insect welfare projects on the IWRS resources page, under ‘grants and funders’, here.
Are you interested in developing skills in animal welfare science and entomology? Consider joining our lab! By receiving training in insect welfare science, you can become a member of the next generation of researchers in the field. And if our lab isn’t an option, there are other opportunities for work, training, and grants that are advertised through the IWRS listserv.
No matter what you choose to do on this list, you’ve taken a step towards protecting and promoting the welfare of some of the world’s least protected and most abundant animals.
Thank you for your attention to the evidence, your open-mindedness, and your compassion for the variety of minds that share the world with us.
