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:
If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!
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:
If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!
Bob: Imagine that insects were rare, harmless, and really large, right? Imagine that the only insect out there was the bumblebee, and it was as big as a rhino, and they only lived in Ghana and they didn't hurt anybody. You would love bumblebees, right? They would be your favourite, right? I mean, everybody would be super invested in the preservation of bumblebees, and I think the same is true if you imagine them as termites or whatever else. And I think that shows us something about how we're not really responding to them as individuals. We're responding to other factors, a sense of dispensability, a sense of insignificance, simply in virtue of size and a threat vector; that these are the kinds of things that can harm us. And that combination of factors makes it very hard to sympathise with insects.
Amy: Hi, my name is Amy.
James: And my name is James, and this.
Amy: And this is How I Learned to Love Shrimp, a podcast about promising ways to help animals and build the animal advocacy movement.
James
Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows, and pigs also care about reducing suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fisher from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of these questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects. And we talk about lots of interesting content and research, some of which has really good visualisations and visual aids. So, we'll link that to the top of the show notes, and I highly recommend checking out the Rethink Priorities welfare range table, as well as their welfare range estimates to help get a better understanding of some of the points here, both which are linked below.
Bob also had a great conversation on the 8000 Hours podcast about the Moral Weights Project more broadly and how they want to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered that really well, so we didn't speak much about it today. Again, we'll link it to people who want to know more about that project.
And a few final logistical things from us. We're now uploading our episodes to YouTube, so if you want to listen to our conversation, as well as see our slightly awkward faces, please check it out on YouTube on our How I Learned to Love Shrimp channel, which we'll also link below. And we're putting time stamps in the episode description as not all podcasts show chapter markers, so if you want to use that to skip ahead, please check out the episode description each time. And finally, a big shout out to Elisabeth, who's kindly volunteering her time to help us create transcripts. As a reminder, you can see this on the website if you want to search for things that you may have heard. So again, thank you, Elisabeth. And without further ado, we hope you enjoy the episode.
Amy: Hey, everyone. Welcome. We're joined today by Bob Fisher, senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and associate professor of philosophy at Texas State University. I've had the real pleasure of listening to Bob talk on this topic today at conferences, and I've always found him to be a particularly inspiring speaker. So really interested to deep dive into the world of insects today with our guest, Bob, welcome!
Bob: Thanks so much for having me!
Amy: I would like to know initially: who is someone in the movement that people might not know about that you find particularly inspiring?
Bob: This is a good question. I actually wasn't sure what to say about this one because, of course, so many of the people I find inspiring are ones you're likely to already know. So, finding the unknown folks is really tricky. I actually am inclined to think about people who are totally nameless in the conversation. You know, I think quite often about sanctuary workers, volunteers who are doing this kind of work that is really thankless. I think it's probably not that effective in terms of trying to really maximise impact and yet being willing to spend the time caring for individual animals and being really invested in their wellbeing is something that I find quite inspiring and moving. And they don't get a lot of discussion in the effective animal advocacy movement and I think we've rightly shifted our attention in other directions, but when I think about what keeps me in the game and what moves me to care about animals, it's the plight of particular individuals. And these people are really attentive to that. So, I do really value them and admire them, even though they are unsung.
Amy: Have you ever visited a sanctuary?
Bob: Oh, yeah, many times, many times. And actually, now I live not that far from a farm sanctuary in upstate New York.
James: Oh, great!
Bob: So, yeah, we take my family down there.
Amy: I feel like it's a really nice, like, to reconnect, isn't it? To actually go to the animals and spend a lot of time with them. I saw photographs recently from the Humane League UK and Animal Law Foundation who went to a sanctuary and, yeah, always just sort of grounds all of the work back down to those individuals that you can pick up and hold and care for, like you say.
Bob: It’s a strange thing to spend so much time working on animals and not actually engaging with animals, but that's the life for most of us, right? I mean, we really care about this cause that we're really invested in, and we do tons of work on it and then I spend almost zero time with actual animals. I mean, with some exceptions.
James: So today we're going to talk about insects primarily. But I guess before we get into that, how would you summarise your role at Rethink Priorities and particularly your role in the Worldview Investigations Team rather than the Animal Welfare Team?
Bob: Yeah, so that's a product of practicalities more than anything else. Obviously, a lot of the work that I do is animal-focused, and I certainly could have been housed in the Animal Team, but the kind of things I'm doing now are sort of high-level cause prioritisation projects. And so, I lead the Worldview Investigation Team that is trying to comment on overall resource allocation, in particular within the Effective Altruism Movement. And that's of course, partially motivated by concerns that, maybe, the allocation is not optimal. And so, asking questions about whether we should be spending more money on animals or global health or existential risk or other things. So that's the kind of role that I have in this particular moment, but at the same time, I'm doing in the weeds work, insect-welfare-related projects, and then, of course, am still involved in all the moral-weight-related work about animals.
Amy: Sounds pretty cool as well, right? ‘Worldview Investigations Department’ - I would like that on my business card.
Bob: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's an unusual business card. You can't show that to just everybody, right? It's gonna have to be a particular kind of individual who will geek out about that. But it's true that in the circles that we run in, it might be more trendy.
James: We want to talk specifically abound insect welfare. And I guess you are, well – also as a board member of the Insect Welfare Research Society, do you think insects are smarter or more complex than people give them credit for? And what are some examples of that?
Bob: I am involved with the Insect Welfare Research Society, and I myself am not a biologist; I'm not an entomologist; this is not my primary domain of expertise. My background is primarily in ethics and welfare-related issues, in animal husbandry and so on and so forth. So, since I've picked up over the years as I've been reading and writing about these topics, been working on animal stuff for the last whatever it is, 12-13 years, I will say some things. But let's remember that the people you really want to talk to are the entomologists who have just so much more knowledge than I do.
That being said, yeah, I do think it's pretty easy to underestimate what's going on in insects. And we're often just really short-sighted in terms of the way we think about them as animals. You know, there are a zillion examples that we could come up with. So, things like, you know, when ants get into battles with termites, they'll take their wounded kin back to the nest and they'll actually apply this antibiotic secretion to help them heal faster. And there are, you know, a million cases of tool use. And then there is evidence of giving gifts to one another. And they even have songs. And there are little wasps that have facial recognition abilities and can each identify every other one in the hive based on the distinct markings on their faces. And then, of course, there are the kinds of things that are not that exciting to describe abstractly, but are actually pretty impressive, like the ability to engage in transitive inference. They can say: ‘Oh, if A then B and B then C. So, if A then C.’ They can make that inferential step.
James: Which insects can do that? Or is that pretty broad amongst them?
Bob: The problem with all of these cases – I'm thinking about wasps where that particular study was done – the problem with all of this is that we're talking about 5.5 million species. So, when I talk about insects, I'm talking about this incredibly large, diverse group of organisms. We can sort of go and find very cool traits across all that diversity, as you would expect. And it makes it really difficult to know exactly when you can generalise and when you can't. So, we don't want to suggest the same things are true of every species at the same time. The diversity and range should make us think: ‘Okay, probably there’s a lot more going on here than we may have appreciated to begin with.’
The other crucial piece is to remember is that as smart as many insects in fact are, as much as we're underestimating their abilities, the real question is whether they can suffer. And, of course, that's what we care about; most of us. We're really motivated to prevent unnecessary suffering, particularly in farm contexts. There is evidence that we have these sorts of capacities in some insects. And for me, I think one of the most compelling lines of evidence is just how useful some insects have proven to be as pain models for studying human pain. The striking thing about this is you'll keep finding these researchers in all these papers saying: ‘Oh, isn't it great that this neurological system is so similar to what we find in humans? It makes it so valuable for studying these phenomenon of pain.’ And you think: ‘Wow, that is a really striking claim to make when you're doing all of these terrible things to these insects.’ But it does help you think about the fact that it's not just that there's some particular behaviours that you might notice and think: ‘Oh, well, that could be the evidence of pain.’ It's that actually, when you're getting down to the neurophysiological traits, they are useful for understanding human pain, which is highly suggestive.
Amy: I think that's really fascinating. I feel like a lot of those anecdotes or examples of insects interacting in a way that we wouldn't expect are really interesting. I feel like there's always so much to learn in this area. As you say, so many individuals, so many species, still so much that we don't know.
One question, I think, that seems to be the big one (and it was the same when we spoke to Andreas about shrimp welfare): what evidence do we actually have that insects are sentient, or that they do have the capacity to feel?
Bob: Yeah, so that's a good question. And it's a hard and complicated question, because, of course there are a lot of moving parts in thinking about how you go about assessing sentience and insects. There's this approach that we've got already; there's a great review paper that has roughly twelve bazillion citations in it [Laughing], looking at all of this incredible literature that's out there about the capacities of these animals (Matilda Gibbons was the one as the first author on that paper). And what they do is they have these four behavioural traits and then four physiological traits, and they say: ‘Well, what we're going to do is review the evidence with respect to those particular properties that might be evidence for sentience.’ And this is the same framework that was used to get decapod crustaceans considered as sentient for UK law. When they did that, they found what they consider to be strong evidence of sentience in at least a couple of taxonomic groups.
So, it's going to be looking at things like, is there no suspicion? So, like, is there detection of damage? Is there sensory integration? So, are different kinds of sensory bits of information being used in a coordinated way? Is there like a response to analgesics? So, do we get the same kind of responses to pain modulators that you see in other kinds of animals, and so on and so forth. And all of those things are sort of collectively serving as evidence.
Now, of course it's possible that you get all those cool things, and you don't get sentience. There is some level of uncertainty here. It's not like, you know, the case is knocked down, drag out, et cetera. However, the more we learn, the more impressive the abilities of these animals appear to be, the more striking the kinds of traits that they have, and the more we find similarities between them and animals we take to be sentient uncontroversially, llike birds, reptiles, mammals, et cetera. So, the way to think about it is not so much: ‘Is there any evidence for insect sentience?’ Almost more like, you know, there's sort of impoverished evidence for the sentience of some of these other animals that we do take to be sentient. And insects are just in the same boat, right? So, it's almost more like, you know, if you're really trying to figure out how good is the evidence that frogs are conscious and can feel pain – and we're pretty confident that they are conscious and can feel pain – well, actually the evidence is not that much different than what we already have in place for insects. And so that can sort of give us some perspective on how good the evidence needs to before this seems like a reasonable conclusion to draw.
James: I do find it very kind of surprising or striking that two orders of insects that include cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes, are actually found to have a stronger evidence base for pain compared to things like crabs, lobsters and shrimp. And I think most of us would be pretty – well, I guess now, the UK government itself has said they think crabs, lobster and shrimp are sentient. So, then it's weird that we don't give that same kind of benefit of the doubts or even just like leeway to insects. And I think there's just so little evidence. So, it's for so many of these things, we just don't know. It's not like we've actually found they fail on some aspests. Actually, we just don't know much about them. And do you think if we actually knew more, the evidence would become stronger and stronger?
Bob: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think one of the ways of appreciating this is to think about – and I myself have done this, so I'm going to be critical now, reporting my own earlier era or error, rather – there's this old review from the eighties, this paper, and it talks about, ‘do insects feel pain?’ and it tries to make the case that they probably don't. And you go back and you look at that paper now and you just see how many flat-out, inferential mistakes are in the paper, and then just how much the empirical evidence has been significantly changed over time. How much more we know about the abilities of the insects and also these striking confusions about what would be relevant for an instinct.
So just to give a couple of examples of this: people make a big deal out of these behavioural phenomena, and they want to say things like: ‘Oh, well, mantises will allow themselves to be eaten, and so they must not – it's not possible that they're experiencing pain.’ And we never think about, like, first of all, the fact that some mantises do actually fight back to the death because they don't want to get eaten. So, it's just not universally true, but also that different life histories are going to have very different kinds of behavioural responses being appropriate. And depending on what your body is made of and whether it heals in a certain way, it might not make sense to protect certain kinds of limbs. And so, people focus on mechanical damage, like: ‘Oh, well, you know, you can rip the leg off of this thing and it will keep moving’ as opposed to thinking: ‘Oh, but you know what? It really doesn't like being burnt. It doesn't like high temperatures or doesn't like electric shocks. You do actually get exactly the responses you would expect from an organism experiencing pain, just not from this other thing that you might have thought was a big deal if what your model of an insect is a tiny little mammal.’ So, like, once you get away from that set of assumptions about what you're dealing with, you really can think very differently about what the evidence should look like and what it would mean to assess this stuff well.
Amy: And do you think there's a size bias there? We've obviously size and maybe even ugliness, because when we started with chickens, it's hard to get people to feel compassionate about birds. And then we've moved on to fish, and that's incredibly difficult. Through to shrimp and now talking about insects, which many of us actually, will routinely kill themselves right in the house; a spider or a fly or a mosquito. What do you think is at play there? Is it to do with size? Is it to do with how they look or the quantity or them just feeling kind of inferior in some way?
Bob: It's a really interesting, complicated question. There should be more empirical work on this to really get at it. Before I answer the question directly, just a few comments. One is: people don't realise how big insects can be. I mean, there are insects as big as your hand. And, you know, people do have – they're not insects, but you think about large tarantulas, people get quite affectionate toward their pet tarantulas. You know, so there are these enormous arthropods that people are very attached to and really connect with. And it just turns out that we often focus on the cases where if you focus on the mosquito, it's easy to feel sort of anti-insect or not sufficiently sympathetic to insects. But actually, when you sort of think more broadly about, again, the diversity of what you're dealing with, you get a different sort of story. So that's one thing to say.
Second thing to say is, like, Amy, I will admit, I will confess that I share your thought that not all these insects are that cute. However, it's also striking if, you know, if we say this in front of some of my entomologist friends, they'll get very upset because it turns out that, how much time you spend thinking about and studying these animals really affects how cute you find them. I think this says more about us and the kinds of animals we spend time with and the kinds of animals we sort of spend our time looking at the photographs that we absorb. If you spend a minute googling cute insect pictures, you will rapidly find things that will tug at your old heartstrings. So, we also want to remember that we're not really looking for ways of emotionally connecting and seeing them as appealing, but then to get at the question directly. Yeah. I mean, so basically, my view is: imagine that insects were rare, harmless, and really large, right? Imagine that the only insect out there was the bumblebee, and it was as big as a rhino, and they only lived in Ghana and they didn't hurt anybody. You would love bumblebees, right? They would be your favourite, right? I mean, everybody would be super invested in the preservation of bumblebees, and I think the same is true if you imagine them as termites or whatever else. And I think that shows us something about how we're not really responding to them as individuals. We're responding to other factors: a sense of dispensability, a sense of insignificance, simply in virtue of size and a threat vector; that these are the kinds of things that can harm us. And that combination of factors makes it very hard to sympathise with insects.
James: On the size bias question: I guess I totally agree that we probably do have some bias, but I also think, isn't that somewhat justified? Because surely smaller animals have smaller brains, therefore less ability to feel and think and have complex emotions. So, isn't some size bias justified?
Bob: There are a few things to say about that. One is: what's the evidence for that correlation? Actually, as we were talking about earlier, you're going to see all the kinds of traits that you might find really appealing in much larger animals, in insects. So, do you want an example of monogamous parental care for life? Yep, there's an insect species that does that. Do you want an example of memory of some kind that appears to exist throughout the lifespan? So, like, long-term retention of information? Oh, yeah, we've got that in insects. In fact, sometimes even through metamorphosis, right, which is really wild to think; that information can be preserved across that kind of transition. Are you looking for social learning? We seem to have that in insects. It was actually just a great paper that came out about that recently.
So it might be the case that if size really tracked those traits, and we could say: ‘Oh, yeah, you find less of these interesting behaviours and less sophisticated cognition as size decreases’ then it would be a good heuristic. But I think just as a matter of fact, isn't. And another way of appreciating that is by recognising that there also have been these huge shifts in evolutionary history, right. So, insects used to be really huge back in the cretaceous period, right. And so, what happened was, over time, various forces resulted in the shrinking of their body sizes. It doesn't necessarily mean that they lost all these interesting traits and behaviours. So even if there was like, its size was a useful heuristic at some point in evolutionary time, which I’m not saying is true but even if it were true, it would be important to remember that actually, that wouldn’t always help us think about the organisms were dealing with in the present.
James: Do you have any more examples of specific insects and things like either fear-like behaviour or anxiety or parental care or anything else you think is a pretty surprising thing that people wouldn’t expect insects to exhibit?
Bob: There are people who are really good at delivering a million of these facts. You want to talk to entomologists for that sort of thing, generally, not philosophers. The second thing to say is, if you look at the kind of work that we did in the Moral Weights Project, which I'm sure we'll link in the show notes, you can see a long list of traits that we found in silkworms and black soldier flies that could be helpful for thinking about some of these capacities in insects. Things like wound tending or parental care or things like recognition of others, things like the navigation abilities, all these different sorts of traits that someone might find.
But I think the larger thing to say to this desire to commit these sorts of traits, is that I feel a pull of it, too. Like, I'm moved by cute stories about bumblebees playing in Lars Chittka’s lab and like, oh, how cool. Isn't this great? We sort of find this. I simultaneously do want to be able to give you what you want and motivate or sell the idea that insects are worthy of sympathy. And yet I also, at the same time want to say, suppose it turns out that they're really boring, suppose it turns out that they don't do a lot of cool things, but they can be hurt; that would still be enough for me to be worried about them. And I think it's probably enough for you, really, the truth be told.
And I think then the question is: ‘Okay, so what do you make of the fact that we have the kinds of things, the traits that we've already discussed, right?’ That we have no susception, that we have responses to analgesics, that we have, you know, in some cases, conditioned place aversion, where, you know, cockroaches will learn that there's a negative stimuli over there and they won't want to go back to that place even when the stimuli is removed because they're afraid of the threat, right? And the fact that they show this kind of symptoms of optimism and pessimism; they can have, you know, they can come to interpret ambiguous stimuli in ways that are suggesting the world is friendly or the world is a scarier place; that kind of behaviour, right? This is all the stuff that's evidence of affect, evidence of systems for processing pain that are similar to the ones that we find in other animals, et cetera. That, to me, is the central stuff.
And then it turns out like: ‘Oh, yes, insects are very cool and they do lots of really interesting and diverse sorts of things.’ But actually, like, I was never, when I think about chickens – like, I didn't come to care about chickens because I thought: ‘Oh, man, they're so smart.’ I was like ‘Oh, man, we're really torturing them. We should stop that.’ I think that's sort of my same attitude toward insects where I'm like, as someone who's not an entomologist and for whom the particular behaviours and capacities are not my primary focus, I'm like: ‘Well, have we cleared sufficient evidence to be concerned about suffering? Yep. Well, I learned what I needed to know onto the question of how to assess welfare.’ That's the kind of approach that I tend to have and that explains in part, I think, my limited knowledge about all these cool bug facts that I wish I could share with you.
Amy: No, I think that's a great answer, and certainly I'm hearing a lot of cool bug facts that I didn't know already. So, your catalogue is much greater than either mine or James's, I'm sure. So, yeah, thanks for those.
Thinking about the relation then to farmed animals: obviously, generally, we on this podcast talk about farmed animals and are in that space of looking at welfare improvements for farmed animals. Do you think that the reason we're talking about this today and that so much more research is being done in this area is the real rise insect farming and of course, the suffering of those insects on farms? Or do you think there's also this kind of widening of the moral circle looking into insects in the wild? How much influence do you think had the fact that farming of these insects is starting to increase, either for consumption or to be made into other animal feed? What do you think has been that catalyst for us to be having this conversation today?
Bob: The big issue here is how did this conversation get started? How do we end up chatting about this topic in the first place? So, the main way to think about this is that there is a big change happening in the human demand for protein. There's expectation that by 2050, you're going to get 70% more demand, and that's driven by population increase, plus a rising middle class that wants more animal-based foods. Then the question is, how are you going to feed the animals people want to eat? And the basic story about that is that you can feed them, you know, either stuff we grow or stuff that we're catching from the oceans. You know, one of those two things, we are just running into sustainability problems on both fronts, right? We're running out of fish to harvest for fish meal, and we're at the same time having problems with, you know, clearing deforestation to grow more soy to provide more protein.
And so in that context, insects look like this very attractive solution because they can recycle waste. And so people are thinking: ‘Hey, we want this sort of circular system where the waste streams from all these other forms of food production are repurposed and converted into a high-quality product that can provide a high-quality protein to the animals humans want to eat, in particular, fish.’ So farmed fish and shrimp are actually the biggest applications right now. It's the easiest applications. It's where most of the money is, but then there are also potentially other kinds of animals. So, I've got a colleague at Texas State who does work on black soldier fly as cattle feed.
People are looking for any way that they can use these insects and monetise them. So that's where the industry is coming from. That's what's driving the interest in it. There has been significant capital investment in the insects as food and feed industry over the last several years. And the challenge is to see if you can scale, to see if you can find ways of making this a sustainable enterprise. And of course, that's the thing that's going to create all the kinds of welfare concerns that we're familiar with from other industries, right? So, it's one thing when Aunt Jenny is growing some mealworms in her shed so that she can feed them to her pet lizard or whatever. And it's a very different thing when you're talking about these facilities that might be rearing hundreds of millions, billions, potentially a trillion insects in a year. Now, we're dealing with economies of scale from the producer side, but we're dealing with potentially enormous amounts of harm from an advocacy perspective and from a welfare-oriented perspective. And so, you want to look at the kinds of questions that are going to come up when you're raising animals at mass scale of this type.
Amy: And I think that quantity statement is so important because we think about raising enough insects to feed a cow. And just those numbers seem astronomical in terms of that cow's lifetime and how many individuals – we talk about the individual in this type of work, right? We want to know the narrative of the individual chicken or the individual fish. And here we're talking about an individual insect. And actually, that's going to be one of probably millions fed to just one cow. So, yeah, I think the quantity is just so important to try and understand. And I often find those really large numbers actually very difficult to comprehend. It's already difficult with fish and with shrimp, and then it's just a hole at the level for insects.
Bob: And I mean, I do think the mind boggles, you're right. I mean, I feel the same way where I can say these numbers but I don't feel their emotional impact. It just doesn't – it's like, well, a trillion is the same thing as a thousand, but of course it's not. And you have to work really hard to keep yourself kind of vulnerable to the scale question.
James And in terms of the actual numbers of insects farmed and maybe what that projects to be over the next decades, do you know what the numbers look like, Bob?
Bob: We're a little short on good estimates of the numbers, as is so often the case in work of this kind. The most recent quantitative estimate of the size of the industry was from 2020. Abraham Rowe put that together, and he estimated roughly a trillion individuals being farmed on annual basis. There's been pretty significant growth in the industry since then and of course, he was just thinking about the food and feed context. So, he wasn't thinking about things like silk and silkworms or dyes, shellac, you know, pollination species that are bred for control applications, et cetera. So, like, there are many more individuals affected than was initially estimated. Now there are facilities being built that might themselves individually be able to produce a trillion insects in a year. So, we are looking at very rapid growth and very significant scale.
James: I went to a talk by Meghan Barrett, who talked about the potential growth of the industry, and I think she gave some numbers that it may even be around 70 trillion insects by 2050 because of the growing demand for aquaculture. And also, like you said, land animals. And I think that seems like absolutely astounding. That could be so significant. So, I think the scale thing, as Amy was saying, it really does boggle. But, yeah, it's important to have the scope insensitivity in mind, and that really is such a ginormous number. And how we actually think about that advocacy is, yeah, it feels quite challenging, at least for me.
Bob: Yeah, it's very challenging. And it's also difficult because I think we're just not as good at thinking about the welfare issues and appreciating the welfare issues, right. So, it's one thing to see pictures from inside factory farms of chickens, and you see these feather-pecked hens and they look awful. And you understand, sort of in some intuitive, visceral way, how badly off that animal is. It’s a lot harder to look at a mealworm and have that same intuitive reaction. The kinds of factors that you’re interested in, like: ‘Okay, well, what’s the relative humidity in the environment? And what’s the pH here? What kind of low oxygen points are we dealing with? How is the temperature being affected?’ Blah, blah. All these different kinds of factors that are significant for how these animals are faring, they don't trigger our immediate intuitive reactions the same way.
I think it's the same problem we face with fish, where it's this stuff that happens below the surface of the water. You don't really see it the same way. You don't respond to it viscerally in the same way. But of course, it makes a big impact on the lives of those kinds of animals. So just as there are huge barriers to sympathising with fish, with decapod crustaceans, we face all those same things when we're dealing with insects. And we have to try to figure out: ‘Okay, well, how is it that we can be responsive and appreciate the significance of these welfare issues that might not be obvious to us otherwise?’
James: One welfare issue that I do find quite striking in the insect cases (I think Megan mentioned this in her talk, which we'll link below, as well as a summary of the research paper and some of your work on the welfare range table) is the way some of these insects kill. I think black soldier flies, they're actually either microwaved or put in an oven until they basically die from almost exploding, which it seems like that was very visceral, like, wow, this is an unbelievable way to kill animals. Do you know more about that? Am I remembering broadly correctly?
Bob: So what's going on there is depending on the use of the insect, they're going to be very different processing strategies. So sometimes you can grind them. Sometimes, though, you're going to want to boil them; sometimes you're going to want to flash freeze them; sometimes you're going to want to microwave; sometimes you're going to want to use ovens, et cetera. And these are all depending on the intended outcome, what you hope the product will end up becoming.
And of course, some of those ways of killing are really fast, or at least relatively fast. So, there's work on how to speed up the, you know, the rate of killing when you're grinding. And so, we can get that with some modifications down to a relatively quick slaughter rate. Some of these things are just inherently slow because that's what's required to desiccate the animal if that's the kind of product that you're looking for. And that just of course, is going to take minimally minutes to kill those animals. So, if we think about how quick slaughter is now for terrestrial vertebrates, we actually – it's still bad, but we've gotten the time to death down considerably and we're just not anywhere close to that on the insect front.
Amy: What are some of the welfare concerns? Is it similar to what we see with a lot of fish and chicken? We're talking about stocking densities and temperature, as you alluded to previously. Are there kind of other maybe surprising welfare concerns, particularly when it comes to insects?
Bob: There's a lot to talk about here, and there are some great papers that are systematic reviews of this that I encourage people to take a look at if they're interested. And I can point people to those in the notes, if that would be helpful. Yeah, you're right that a lot of these are sort of familiar issues. So, yes, high stocking densities, yes, questions about temperature, yes, questions about various other kinds of, like, humidity-based sorts of concerns that are relevant for how these insects manage. There's also significant issues of cannibalism in some of these species that you have to be concerned about.
One of the difficulties is that it's just so hard to measure some of this. So, people often talk about frass, insect frass, which is thought to be faeces, but it's more than that. It's also just all the kind of leftover tiny parts of insects that, you know, may have been partially consumed by other insects. It's the kind of residual stuff. And so just tracking the numbers of individuals and figuring out what the immortality rates are is really, really difficult. We're dealing with organisms in an environment – it's not even like when you're dealing with fish and that you can see through the medium. You're dealing with opaque mediums, and you're dealing with poorly understood species where there's been almost no research at all on the welfare questions. We're at the earliest days of trying to figure out what should be done, what best practices would be, what to advocate for, et cetera. However, what are people excited about in the industry? They're interested in things like feed conversion rates. Well, how are you going to get higher feed conversion rates? Well, we know what happened with chickens when we did that. We bred for fast growth chickens, and that produced a wide range of familiar welfare problems, this rapid weight gain that puts stress on their cardiovascular systems and so on and so forth. We should expect to see similar sorts of things where you're going to get some mixture of selective breeding and genetic engineering that tries to produce animals that are the most efficient possible feed converters and with predictable cost of the animals.
Amy: This is really going to be an issue at the heart of the industry and something that I was just thinking: there is a challenge with getting the public to be concerned about the welfare standards of the animals that they actually consume (so chickens, pigs, cows, fish) and now we're asking them to care about the welfare of animals that are made and to feed for the animal that they're going to consume. And so, it seems like such a giant leap further backwards than the kind of advocacy that we're working on right now, that those approaches and the way that we tackle the industry is going to be really integral as to how successful challenging those welfare issues is going to be because that public angle is just, seems at the moment, kind of impossible.
Bob: Yeah, that sounds about right. You know, it's a tough road. I mean, it's a tough road, and I think it's especially difficult in the case of insects, just because, again, how comfortable people feel thinking about them as dispensable, et cetera; how little people are inclined to distinguish them from plants, you know; the way that they are almost not fully categorised as animals. So, yeah, these are just really hard problems. I'm not thinking about public support as particularly central at this stage to the conversation.
There are a few things to say. One is, though these producers are indeed ultimately committed to building this industry and becoming really successful at doing it; it's a values-driven industry. These folks are invested because they care about sustainability, because they see important human concerns that can be addressed by this industry. We might disagree with them about the means that they are choosing to meet those needs. However, I think we should take them at their word that they care about welfare and are interested in trying to incorporate this stuff. This is not the same thing. We don't have any generations-old family dynasties of cricket farming in the way that we have generations-old dynasties of cattle farming.
Amy: Yeah, it's a great point.
Bob: We want to remember that these are still folks with whom there are lots of productive discussions to be had. And so, yeah, it may be the case that we're going to have mass rearing of these animals for a long time. That doesn't mean that looking for high welfare ways of raising these animals is off the table. There are, of course, economic pressures. Of course, those are not going to cut in the direction that we might like. But that's one thing to say.
The second thing to say is we're going to have to think about the ways of integrating welfare in as capital investment is taking place. So, think about the issue of chicken depopulation. Chicken depopulation is an absolute crisis right now. Why is it a crisis? Well, it's because none of the chicken sheds that we have now were built with the thought of killing the entire flock at one time. That just wasn't a design problem that anyone considered when they were constructing these spaces. And so now the options for killing these animals are really limited. And so, we're left in this really tragic situation now that's an engineering problem, right? If different investments had been made at the outset, then we wouldn't necessarily be in that situation and we wouldn't be facing these horrible moral choices about what to do. Likewise, if we can get good research done on high-welfare production and we can encourage producers to adopt it, then it might be possible to head off a lot of the worst welfare issues. And so that's, I think, a constructive strategy to take and to think about this as preventative medicine for an emerging industry rather than being reactive to an established problematic industry.
Amy: So we're talking a lot about preventative measures there. And that's suggesting, and as it is now, that the industry exists and it's kind of progressing at a really rapid rate. What are your thoughts on this kind of preventative angle of actually stopping expansion rather than waiting until it's existing and much more prevalent and then looking at the welfare issues? Actually, just trying as much as possible and putting as much of our resource right now into prevention as we are with other species, for example octopus farming, which is just starting up. There's a lot of effort and a lot of advocacy being put into just stopping that before it even starts. What are your thoughts on that?
Bob: There are a lot of different roles for different people to play in the animal advocacy world. My focus is on trying to understand sentience and welfare of insects. And my focus is on trying to figure out, okay, how good is the evidence here for these animals being morally relevant? And if they are morally relevant, what kinds of needs do they have? And then what does it take to make people aware of those, like the pressures on them, the welfare threats to them? You know, other folks are going to come at this from other angles and, you know, with more power to them, but it's not what I do and it's not what I think about and research. And so, I can't really comment much on the wisdom of different strategies or what people ought to be doing.
James: Do you have a sense of what are the best interventions that we know of to actually help insects?
Bob: You know, right now, as I think my answers have suggested, I think we're in a spot where we don't have a deeply hostile relationship between people who are concerned with animal welfare and the industry. It's not like, you know, the relationship between the US animal advocacy community and the National Chicken Council, for instance. That's just not the situation. I think it's important to take producers seriously as people who are value-driven and care about investing in these kinds of issues and tried to incorporate welfare into their thinking and their conversations and the design of their facilities and to be clear about these are the kinds of asks that are valuable. And that, of course, requires a lot of research to figure out what the asks should be and then pushing for those kinds of changes at the industry level. It's still early days…
I think probably the most important thing to do is for there to be research and coordination. It's not the time for people to think that they've got the answer and they can unilaterally see what they ought to do. They should be getting in touch with folks who have been doing this for a little bit while longer, try to figure out how they can be helpful, where they can actually serve the existing efforts that are being made. My main focus is on helping us figure out what kinds of things we actually want, having those conversations with producers, and then seeing how much more we can improve the welfare of these animals in these contexts.
Amy: I'm interested then, from your experience with working with the producers, because it's surprising to me there that you would suggest that they would care about sustainability or the welfare on any level. As we've seen in many ways for other species, the main focus being profitability, speed, and then the welfare of the animals, like really low down. Do you think that is different for this industry? And if so, perhaps, why would that be the case?
Bob: We should not expect people who are first and foremost concerned to make a profit, make animal welfare central to their concerns, especially in the case of animals with whom it's harder to sympathise. So, I don't want to valorise here unnecessarily. At the same time, my experience from chatting with people has been that they are very values-oriented and see this as a legitimate and important concern. You know, they could have circled the wagons a lot faster and not wanted to have conversations with folks like me. And that has not been the kind of approach they've taken. They've instead said: ‘Yep, this is a thing we care about.’
I mean, maybe it's humane washing. There are all kinds of things you can say about this, sure, but it seems like it's a live discussion and something that people want to take seriously and are looking at in a way that deserves at least some acknowledgement.
That being said, we should also, I think, recognize that there's going to be a tension for most of us in thinking about any form of animal husbandry, where we're going to just have reservations about the way this is done and the way this possible to go. I think the most optimistic read, which, you know, may not be the right read, but I think the most optimistic read is that it might be possible actually to give some of these animals really good lives; much easier to give them really good lives than it is to give pigs really good lives, for instance, in fairly high stocking density environments, highly productive facilities. And if that's the case, then we might still worry about killing; we might still worry; it doesn't mean that the moral concerns have completely been eliminated. But if we're focused on welfare, that could be some consolation, if it is indeed possible and we can steer the industry in that direction. I just really have my doubts about whether there will ever be a cafo that's good for pigs. And so, we do want to have that species diversity inform our thinking more broadly here as well.
James: How many people like yourself or others do you think are working on improving the lives of farmed insects globally?
Bob: I mean, not more than two dozen, and I'd be impressed if it were two dozen. I mean, I think in terms of it being the main area of focus, it's certainly not that many. It's probably fewer than one dozen. And then there's a, you know, penumbra of people who have it as an area of interest and are working on it to some degree, but it's not primarily what they do. So, it's a very small community we're talking about, you know, a tiny, tiny group of people. And in part, that's because there's a lot of domain knowledge that's required. It's just been neglected for a long time; there are not networks to plug into; it's historically not been the focus of the animal advocacy movement, et cetera. So, there are lots of barriers to entry. And of course, insect farming just wasn't nearly as big of a deal when the animal advocacy movement really got going.
James: Given the focus of your work at Rethink is trying to comment on resource allocation (as you were saying earlier) do you have a sense of what the ideal resource allocation should be for how many people would be working on insects, given both the scale of the problem and the welfare considerations and everything we've spoken about?
Bob: That's a really good question. I mean, I would love to see more people doing research. Like, right now it feels to me that the thing that's most difficult is just to get the most basic welfare questions answered. What kinds of humidity should we want for these animals? What are the stocking densities that are in fact, going to be tolerable for them from a welfare perspective? Which slaughter practices that are feasible at scale, are going to best? We just need people who are willing to do this kind of on-the-ground empirical research, and we don't have that many bodies at this point.
So I think that gap, it's the main bottleneck, because if you gave me ten energetic advocates and said: ‘Okay, great, go put them to work’ and I would say: ‘Well, I'm really not sure what you should be doing with your time right now.’ You know, so it's not like: ‘I think it's just obvious exactly where resources should be allocated’ along the sort of more traditional advocate animal advocacy efforts, although there are interesting people to talk to about this. Abraham Rowe is someone you could get in touch with who is thinking about these kinds of questions.
But in terms of the larger, you know, question of resources, ‘how much we should want going toward this’, I think we should acknowledge it still can feel a bit like a high-risk, high-reward bet. People might have their doubts about sentience of these animals. You know, I certainly came in with those doubts, and I think I'm more and more sympathetic to the view that many insects are sentient than I was, you know, a few years ago. I've been learning a ton over the course of the last several years about this, but it's not like I think: ‘Oh, wow, just based on the numbers, you know, 90% of resources should be going to farmed insects’ or something like that, right now.
There are things we know to do for other farmed animals; they're good things to be doing; we should keep doing them. We should be trying to put money into the infrastructure, the research infrastructure, and then ultimately the advocacy infrastructure that will allow other work to happen down the line. And that might not be too far down the line. It might be three to five years. But it's a hard moment to act confidently just because of how little is really understood.
Amy: And what's the global concentration of the farms actually like? Is it parallel and sort of mirroring farming as we know it now for other species? Are we seeing most of it happening in Asia and North America, coming into Europe? What's the geographic location looking like?
Bob: You know, it's scattered. There's a lot in Thailand, France, South Africa, China, Canada, the US. I mean, you know, so it's all over the map. A big facility just opened in Vietnam last year, there are a couple of Singapore-based companies. So, it's fairly diverse in terms of its geographic location. But understandably, because of the focus on aquaculture (shrimp farming, fish farming) it makes sense to be geographically located close to major operations of those kinds. And because so much of that is happening in Southeast Asia and then increasingly elsewhere in the world, but in particular there, you should expect a lot of the growth in the industry to be in those regions.
James: Maybe as like, a controversial question that I'm gonna reference from Peter Singer's comments a few years ago at a conference I was at: he thought it was too soon to work on insect welfare. I think primarily thinking from a public angle, kind of similar to what Amy was mentioning in that the public's having a tough time even getting grips with chickens and fish and other beings, and therefore, it's kind of too soon. And I think he can advocate for some kind of slow moral circle expansion such that you work on progressively slightly more weird animals and one day will reach insects. But I get the sense you disagree with that because you think we're at a pivotal moment right now where we can kind of shape the future of the industry, and you think it's important to act with that in mind. Is that broadly correct?
Bob: What Singer is saying there makes a lot of sense if you're thinking about: ‘do I want PETA to start a billboard campaign focused around black soldier fly larva?’ Probably not, no.
James: I mean, they've done worse things. [Laughing]
Bob: No, I'm not trying to be critical of PETA, but the point is, like, is that the thing that I think would be the most useful use of their resources? No, it is not. And so, I agree that this is not the kind of thing that we want to push into the public consciousness at this particular moment. But I think it's easy to underestimate the possible public sympathy. You know, I've been doing some writing on reactions to invasive species management over the spotted lanternfly that was a big deal in the northeast and in the US. It's really striking to see people get upset about the destruction of these insects, and they are beautiful animals.
And so that might be part of what's going on as people are just reacting to beauty, but you do get pushback, and you think: ‘Okay, here are folks feeling frustrated with a management campaign and seeing some value in these organisms. And that's really striking.
And as another kind of amazing example, I don't know if either of you have children and are familiar with the kids show Bluey, but this is, like, the most popular show among small children. So, if you have little kids, they've all seen it and they all love it; this Australian television show that's like taking the world by storm. And one of those recent episodes is all about these characters being kind to insects and choosing not to harm them. And in fact, having like, quite sophisticated moral discussions about this. And so I was incredibly impressed and I thought: ‘Oh, wow, what a moment for conversation about creating a culture of compassion.’ And I think that for me, is the thing that makes me not quite as sceptical as Singer is about this.
Even on the public-consciousness side, because I think there is a lot of appetite in western societies for a shift toward a culture of compassion. I think a lot of the progressive sentiment over the last 20-30 years has been toward that. In many ways, insects are this wonderful test case for a culture of compassion because they are incredibly vulnerable and we have so much power over them and we can, of course, do whatever we want with them. And for us to decide that we are going to be compassionate, there can be an important part of creating the kind of culture and community that we ultimately want to achieve. And so, I think I'm more optimistic than I would have ever been at this particular moment, having seen some of these particular things.
But suppose I'm wrong about all that; bracket it, set it aside. I'd still say: ‘Yeah, look, always better to be in at the ground floor of an industry than to be coming in when it's established.’ And so, if we can be productive now, if we can do the research that's required and we can have the hard conversations about how to do high-welfare production, I think it's absolutely worth doing.
Amy: I think there's also an opportunity for some creativity in our advocacy here as well. I think we don't have to go down the traditional routes of trying to expand the moral circle. There's other options. Like, for example, just inciting disgust. You know, telling the public that there's going to be a facility in their hometown that's going to develop and house a billion or trillion bugs.
James: NIMBYism
Amy: Yeah. You know, I'm not seeing that that's going to be even passed in a lot of, you know. Specifically in the UK, you can really object to planning permissions for farms. People aren't even that comfortable, you know, obviously living near pigs or other animals that are raised and then are polluting rivers with waste, et cetera. So, you know, the thought, even when you first mentioned the tarantula at the very start of the podcast, Bob, the hairs on my arms have, you know, raised initially. And so, you can see that there's different types of angles with the public as well, right. We don't have to go down if the ultimate goal is to prevent the industry from expanding or, you know, being able to expand at the rate that it is looking to expand. And there are other angles that we can take as well. We don't have to get everyone to feel something for bugs right now.
Bob: That's right. That's just true.
James: I do worry about this, like, this tension of inciting, like, this fear and disgust of insects and then make people feel compassionate towards them, because ultimately, I think that's going to lead to better results over the long-term. So, I feel like you don't want to go too hard on this. Yeah, I am worried about doing this too much.
Although I do think in terms of other interesting tactics – I know the Aquatic Life Institute has a benchmarking of certifiers, of aquaculture producers, and they rate these certifiers more highly if they don't feed insect feed to the fish. And I think now one of the certifiers, I think GAP, has said they will not use insect feed within their operations, which is amazing. So hopefully, more certifiers will follow this route, even though it's not like the whole aquaculture system, I think it's a good chunk of it, which is pretty promising start. So hopefully there's more interesting tactics about, that can be used.
Amy: Yeah!
James: Yeah, thanks, Bob, so much! I feel like we've both learned a lot about the lives of insects, why it's important to care about them, kind of the facts of that industry, how big it is, how fast it's growing, the welfare concerns. So, I think this has been pretty insightful in a lot of ways. So, yeah, appreciate your time and work on this. I guess, to hopefully move on to slightly more positive or less alarming news: is there anything that you're feeling particularly grateful or excited about recently in the world of animals or insects?
Bob: One thing I'm very excited about is that – it's kind of a wonkish answer, but it's true – the USDA just announced that it's going to do a working group on valuing animals in benefit-cost analyses, which is very exciting because it's one of these moments when animal welfare typically is not quantified and incorporated in a systematic way into these sorts of decisions. And to have it show up more systematically, to me, is really wonderful news, and it's an exciting opportunity for people who have backgrounds in economics, et cetera, animal welfare science, to be really useful informing the way that these valuations are done. So that to me was – I'd sort of gotten pretty pessimistic about animal welfare in the US and started to think like: ‘Oh, well, just focus on other countries. There's just so little federal sympathy for the issue.’ But maybe I have undersold my fellow citizens. So, I'm hopeful that that's true.
James: Fingers crossed; that's very exciting! Yeah, I think we'll put a link to that. I saw that announcement as well. It's very cool. So hopefully something concrete comes out of it in terms of internalising some of these externalities that aren't often quantified.
Amy: And do you have any media recommendations for listeners? Any blog posts or podcast episodes that you would recommend?
Bob: Of course there are a whole bunch of wonderful podcasts, but I'm going to mention two books. One of them is more recent, one of them is a bit older. The more recent one is Barn 8 by Deb Unferth, who is just a wonderful writer to begin with. Just truly beautiful prose. But it's about this woman who becomes animal advocate and gets invested in the project of liberating chickens. And it's a fascinating study of her and her experience. And, you know, it's a fictional story, but very much, I think, true to the psychology of the animal advocacy movement. It's beautifully written; it's very moving; it's worth your time as a piece of fiction if you are into such things.
And the other is an older book. Now, I used to teach this when I would do animal ethics courses. It’s Matthew Scully's Dominion. He was a speech writer for Bush back in the day. So conservative guy, coming from a catholic perspective, but is very interested in this idea that it's our responses to vulnerability that define us and frames our interactions with animals in those terms. And that's the basis on which he condemns so much of what we do. And for him, it's the fact that animals are, in his view, much lesser than us that makes it so horrible that we treat them the way we do. So, as opposed to thinking they're being lesser somehow justifies, instead, he thinks the fact that we would treat individuals wholly under our power, this way speaks horribly of us. I have returned that book many times over in recent years thinking about insects, because I've thought: ‘Oh yeah, this is exactly the kind of case that this book is pushing us to reconsider, where we do have absolute and total dominion and what are we going to do with it?’
James: Thanks so much for two very useful books, and we'll definitely link those in the show notes below. And in terms of people getting involved with the various strands of your work, whether it's Rething Priorities or the Insect Welfare Research Society, how can people get in touch with you and anything you're on the hunt for right now in terms of support?
Bob: It's certainly the case that financial support is very welcome. The Insect Welfare Research Society is in need of financial support. The work at Rethink Rriorities needs financial support. Both of those websites make it clear how to donate in terms of volunteering and otherwise getting involved in the work. Anyone coming with a background in biology, have we got work for you? By all means, let us know, we've got projects. So, there is that kind of first-order welfare research that we would love to have done, and there are long conversations to be had about that.
But I think the main thing is at this point, it's just good to build the network and so subscribe to the IWRS newsletter; subscribe to the research newsletter from Rethink Priorities, see what's happening, figure out where there are projects happening that might be of interest, the kinds of things that you might be able to involve in if you have relevant skills; and stay in touch if this is the kind of thing that you want to be working on, because we're trying to coordinate researchers who can contribute in valuable ways to these projects.
Amy: Well, yeah, it's certainly been an insightful episode. As James said, I think we could have a day-long podcast on this topic, and it wouldn't be long enough to cover it all. So, thank you for compartmentalising it for us, especially when many listeners might be new to the topic. And yeah, I would encourage everyone to follow up with the show notes. We'll link as much as we can from Bob's references. But yeah, for now, just thank you so much for your time!
Bob: Thank you so much for having me on the show! Great conversation! Really enjoyed the chance to be here!