Invertebrate Welfare — August 2020
This month, I'm outlining the charities I know of that work to improve the welfare of invertebrates. This space is very small. The majority of direct work explicitly on invertebrate welfare has focused on decapod crustaceans, and especially banning the live slaughter of lobsters and crabs. If you know of other organizations not included here, please let me know about them!
What organizations are working to improve invertebrate welfare?
Organizations that work directly on invertebrate welfare (or with welfare in mind)
Crustacean Compassion actively campaigns to get decapod crustaceans included in the UK’s Animal Welfare Act 2006, and in other animal welfare legislation.
I believe they are the only organization explicitly and exclusively dedicated to improving invertebrate welfare.
Material Innovation Initiative is a new organization that has projects focused on developing alternatives to silk explicitly to prevent cruelty to silkworms.
Their current plan is to speed up the introduction (and reduce the costs) of silk alternatives, which they hope will be used instead of silk products.
Revive & Restore is a conservation organization that is currently promoting the adoption of alternatives to horseshoe crab blood in the pharmaceutical industry.
Although the organization is focused on conservation, it seems very possible that this intervention is directly reducing horseshoe crab suffering. Horseshoe crabs do not usually die from the bleeding process, but being captured and bled seems reasonably likely to cause stress, pain, and other suffering to the crabs. So, this intervention likely reduces the incidence of painful experiences in wild horseshoe crabs' lives.
[September 2020 edit] Beauty Without Cruelty, a charity in India, investigated an Ahimsa silk farm, which supposedly produced silk without insect death.
They found that most silk moths ended up dying soon after leaving their cocoons anyway, as the process damaged the cocoons and metamorphosing moths.
Viva!, a UK animal rights charity, has an ongoing campaign to include decapod crustaceans, like lobsters and crabs, in the UK’s Animal Welfare Act 2006.
It’s unclear whether this campaign is still active.
There is an active petition Viva! promotes from Crustacean Compassion with over 50,000 signatures in support of this campaign.
Vegan advocacy groups have occasionally spoken up on invertebrate welfare issues. Such efforts have mostly focused on preventing invertebrate deaths, or reducing invertebrate farming.
PETA has campaigned on many issues related to invertebrate welfare over the years, from conducting investigations and campaigns on lobster slaughter to advocating against lethal pest control.
They also currently sell a non-lethal indoor bug trapping device in their store.
The Vegan Society includes insects and invertebrate derived products as products that vegans cannot use or consume in their definition of veganism.
41 animal welfare organizations, from animal rights groups to domestic animal protection organizations, have signed onto a recommendation to the UK government to (among many other things) include more welfare considerations for decapod crustaceans and cephalopods, such as including them in the Animal Welfare Act 2006.
It appears as though some of these groups, such as the RSPCA, have actively campaigned on this issue.
Organizations that work tangentially to welfare
Several conservation and industry organizations work on invertebrate issues that may have an effect on welfare.
BeeInformed Partnership works to prevent colony loss and diseases on commercial bee farms.
BeeConnected is a network that informs beekeepers when local farmers are applying pesticides, in order to reduce bee mortality from pesticides
Xerces Society, Buglife, and other organizations campaign to ban or reduce specific pesticides in order to protect insects.
Organizations that conduct research on invertebrate welfare
FishCount has worked historically to estimate the numbers of decapod crustaceans farmed globally.
Rethink Priorities conducts extensive research on invertebrate welfare [NB: I currently work at Rethink Priorities, but this newsletter reflects my own opinions].
Wild Animal Initiative works on a variety of invertebrate welfare related issues, and has released an extensive report on how pesticides are used in the US, and what questions need to be answered in order to improve insect welfare in agricultural management.
Pesticides are likely the single largest cause of direct human impacts on insects, so making agricultural pesticides more humane is probably one of the largest-scale opportunities we have for improving invertebrate welfare.
Invertebrate welfare news
Two viruses appear to be on the uptick on shrimp farms, DIV1 and HINV.
Both seem to dramatically increase juvenile morality on shrimp farms.
Relatedly, Charity Entrepreneurship has recommended that a shrimp welfare charity be launched in 2020.
A new, controversial study has found that insect biodiversity and abundance are not declining in the US.
This has been framed as running counter to previous studies on insect declines (especially a well-known study in Germany), but this isn’t quite right. The studies looked at different regions, and the newest study didn’t examine populations of several insect groups widely considered to be declining, such as some species of bees.
As far as I can tell, none of the research that’s been published so far is in conflict — some populations of insects are declining, and some are increasing or are stable, and there is significant variation from region to region.
To fight insect declines, Germany is considering reducing night lighting significantly.
World Wildlife Fund - UK, the grocery store chain Tesco, and other stakeholders have commissioned ADAS, an agricultural consulting firm, to develop a plan to upscale insect production for animal feed.
Farming insects for animal feed are a concerning area that might cause significant amounts of harm to insects in the near future.
The project plans to not only study the feasibility of scaling insect production for animal feed, but to make policy and legislative recommendations that will help ease the transition to insect-based feed.
The Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund made a $10,000 USD gift to Crustacean Compassion.
A new study has found that a species of termite evolved non-aggressive,conflict resolution behaviors as a strategy to co-occupy nests built by other species of termites.
New invertebrate welfare books
Two books were released recently that are of direct interest to invertebrate welfare projects.
The Butterfly Effect is a new book on industries that use insects. I just got a copy, so I might review it next month after reading it. It looks like it covers several fairly large insect industries, like silk and carmine production.
Junebug: No Life Too Small is a new children’s book that claims to be the first book focused on teaching children to be kind to insects. It met its crowdfunding campaign goal last month.