Invertebrate Welfare — June 2021
Happy summer! Here is the latest on invertebrate welfare and sentience.
UK animal sentience bill
In the UK, a bill that would recognize the capacity of fish and other vertebrates to feel pain is moving through parliament.
The Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation is arguing that some invertebrates, like octopuses and lobsters, should also be protected by the new law.
The law would require UK policy to take into account animal welfare considerations for vertebrate animals and would require input on policy that impacted animals by animal welfare experts.
The proposed inclusion of invertebrates has received media coverage from major outlets, like the BBC and The Guardian.
Insect raised for food
Regulators in the EU have backed a proposed regulation that would clarify how insect feces (frass) could be used as fertilizer, which is a key part of the business model of many insect farms.
In the same legislation, silkworms have been proposed for authorization as aquaculture feed.
Relatedly, new research in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed reviewed how feeding insects food waste could be used to reduce overall food production costs, including insect feed.
The research found that around 1.4 billion tonnes of food waste is available annually that could be used for insect feed.
The EU is also about to allow insect proteins (from some species) to be fed to poultry and pigs, in a rollback of regulations originally created to prevent bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.
An academic book published this month by Springer focuses on the main opportunities and constraints for insect feed in the EU.
I don’t have access to the book, but it seems to review the global market for insect feed, and opportunities for legislative action to enable insect protein production.
In the US, Petco has added a cricket-based dog food to 800 of its stores, which the brand sees as part of a sustainability push in response to criticism of the pet food industry for its environmental impact.
Vox featured an article discussing the ethics of eating insects.
The article discusses the morality of expanding insect farming, and the potential scale of insect farming.
Insect sentience
At the Justice and food security in a changing climate conference, authors explored how to approach the ethics of insect farming without a way to measure insect sentience.
The authors support using the frustration of desires as a measure of moral standing, and argue that this measure could be studied in insects.
They also argue that there hasn’t been enough research into the desires of insects, and farming them on a large scale without this information is risky, given the potential scale of farms.
Tópicos, a philosophy journal, published an overview of the case for invertebrate suffering, and discussed some of the animal welfare implications of concluding that invertebrates are capable of suffering.
Research published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology found that there is some evidence that the arms of dwarf cuttlefish are individually and independently capable of learning and memory.
Miscellaneous links
Oxitec has been approved to conduct a test release of genetically modified fall armyworms in an effort to control the damage they cause to agricultural crops.
Termites are really good at battling diseases.
Increasingly large populations of chemical-resistant sea lice are being found in the North Atlantic.
Authors in the Griffith Law Review argue that the utilitarian and rational traditions of the law are a barrier to appropriate and action-motivating emotional responses to the extinction of insect species.
A clean meat company is using farmed fruit flies to produce growth factors for their meat replacement products.
Bees have been found to experience symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.
PLANTS HAVE NEITHER SYNAPSES NOR A NERVOUS SYSTEM.
Emphasis theirs.
The paper argues that comparisons between certain features of plants and animal nervous systems are inaccurate, and that this is reason to discount arguments for plant sentience.
Another useful reminder whenever invertebrate sentience and plant sentience are compared as a way to discount invertebrate sentience: humans and invertebrates shared a common ancestor only 570 million years ago, while our last common ancestor with plants was around 1.5 billion years ago.