Is it really cricket, though?

[Graeme M]

How about these bugs?

That is indeed pretty neat. I'm not quite sure what he is doing though - he catches the bugs in that way then releases them elsewhere, I guess? I imagine large scale farms would be unlikely to do that though. But top marks for making the effort, huh?

 

[Graeme M]

All life exists at the expense of other living things. Being the indirect cause of incidental death is part of the moral baseline. Advocating for living beings to be treated as property and killed for money is not.

Some Jains don't eat things that grow underground to avoid killing bugs. That's commendable, and is a good done without commodifying or killing others. But vegans aren't under any moral obligation to go that far...and certainly not obligated to actually eat animals out of similar concerns.

This is just another example of corpse eaters setting the bar for veganism unrealistically high then telling vegans they're hypocrites for not meeting that made up standard.

Do you think that is what the argument is about though? Vegans do not kill any animals for food directly if they buy commercial products. But neither do people who eat cows. Both cause farmers to kill animals by way of economic decisions - the killing is an outcome of agriculture as part of a economic system. The point of intention is at the point of sale. If you know that choosing to buy chickpeas and tofu will cause a great many animal deaths, then you can hardly claim to be innocent of generating the demand from which those deaths occur. You can say, well, I have no choice - I must eat something so the animals killed as a result are hardly my problem. But I fail to see why that is different from eating the cricket? You don't kill the animal in either case. The only sound argument I can see is the notion that other animals should not be treated as commodities, but in real terms, how does this make a difference? The animals don't care and the suffering and death is the same as far as we can tell.

Is it setting the bar unrealistically high in this case? It seems a straightforward standard vegan argument - what is the choice that causes least harm.

“Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm.”

These are the words of the late Tom Regan, an American philosopher specialised in animal rights theory. His 1983 book A Case for Animal Rights has been a standard text for animal rights theory and modern animal rights movements, especially as regards the morality of meat consumption.

I am still not clear on what basis you want to argue against the consumption of the crickets in preference to the store bought plant foods, when the latter is likely to be the greater harm. Claiming unintentionality is a dodge, claiming vegans don't kill animals directly is true but equally true for non-vegans and the moral calculus involved is entirely within the scope of vegan ethics rather than being some imagined extreme bar setting.

The answer to the original question as I see it is that veganism is a personal moral outlook and offers a guide to ethical behaviour. How you decide to enact those are up to you. Eating plants is quite a reasonable stance to take, but on everyday circumstances it may nonetheless not be the best way to proceed. In the case I have described, it seems to me that one would be safe to eat the crickets and reduce one's consumption of store bought plant foods. Either strategy falls within the intent of veganism.

 

[Sax]

We've already covered my thoughts on utilitarianism, but....if breeding humans and keeping the children imprisoned before execution could prevent all the death and suffering from heart disease, how many children would you be willing to inflict that fate on? I would answer zero, utilitarian calculations be damned. And I wouldn't inflict that same fate on crickets to spare the lives of other insects either.

Systematic killing is a much greater violation than incidental death and carries a very different moral culpability. The fact that farmed animals spend their whole lives as helpless victims with no agency and no opportunity to experience this life on their own terms is tragic and criminal. They're a spark of consciousness trapped in a machine meant to give them as little as possible while taking literally everything from them. Wild animals that accidentally die from agriculture at least had a chance, at least had the freedom to live on their own terms, and simply got unlucky and died like every living thing eventually does.

Buying corpses perpetuates the toxic relationship between humans and other animals....ethical veganism aims to break that cycle.

 

[vegansurveyor]

I do have one question for you, Graeme, as I doubt you actually follow utilitarianism.
You've probably stepped on a snail more than once in your life. Probably 10 times or more. However, if you had chosen to stay at home (or if you had died) you would have avoided killing all these innocent snails. So, by knowingly continuing to leave your home, you accept that you will kill more snails during your lifetime. If you follow "vegan ethics" and you decide to cause the least amount of harm to animals, you should never leave your home. Will you do that? If not, you are not following your stated philosophy.

On a related note, I am open to pesticide-free farming and agree it is the more ethical option. One thing that you should note, however, is that the insects coming to eat our food are ultimately interlopers that steal our property, though they do not realize it is ours. Were we to let them eat all our food, they would essentially lead to our deaths, in the same way that if soldiers came and pillaged your granary, they would lead to your death. This conflict between us is irreconcilable; we cannot simply go to them and ask them to stay in the wilderness, or keep them away using less harmful means (if we could, it would be ethical to do so, as it would show love towards our enemies). So while pesticides may kill animals, these are ultimately animals that are in conflict with us, a bit like wolves coming to kill and eat us, not animals we raise for slaughter or game we hunt in the wild.

Future indoor farming techniques might drastically limit or remove the need for pesticides altogether; I as a vegan would very much like to see solutions that repel rather than kill insects. This indoor farm claims to be pesticide-free, and all they do is pick up the insects they find and release them outside the farm:

Cultiveat: The Future of Pesticide-free Farming - Butterkicap

Organic vegetables are gaining in popularity being linked to better health and lower levels of toxic pesticides. But do organically grown produce have less pesticide residue than non-organic foods? After all, while synthetic pesticides are eliminated in organically grown vegetables, they are...

www.butterkicap.com

 

[Graeme M]

if breeding humans and keeping the children imprisoned before execution could prevent all the death and suffering from heart disease, how many children would you be willing to inflict that fate on? I would answer zero, utilitarian calculations be damned. And I wouldn't inflict that same fate on crickets to spare the lives of other insects either.

Well, to be fair that is a nonsense comparison. Crickets are not human beings; we cannot even be sure crickets have mental lives. Imprisoning crickets and killing them is, I suspect, hardly much different to a cricket from living in a field and being killed nastily by a pesticide.

Systematic killing is a much greater violation than incidental death and carries a very different moral culpability.

Is ongoing, wide-scale industrial crop growing utilising intentional pest spraying "systematic" or not? I think spraying crops to kill hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of insects at a time looks rather like systematic killing to me.

The fact that farmed animals spend their whole lives as helpless victims with no agency and no opportunity to experience this life on their own terms is tragic and criminal.

That is not true for all farmed animals at all and I question the likelihood that crickets have any sense of being "helpless" victims.

You've probably stepped on a snail more than once in your life. Probably 10 times or more. However, if you had chosen to stay at home (or if you had died) you would have avoided killing all these innocent snails. So, by knowingly continuing to leave your home, you accept that you will kill more snails during your lifetime. If you follow "vegan ethics" and you decide to cause the least amount of harm to animals, you should never leave your home. Will you do that? If not, you are not following your stated philosophy.

This is misdirection. We are not talking about unfortunate harms arising from often unavoidable acts. We are talking about the harms accruing from deliberate acts. You can make one of probably three choices: eat commercially grown crops and cause a large number of animal deaths; eat crickets grown in a sustainable, circular economy system and cause substantially less suffering and fewer deaths, or seek out some other alternative that causes less harm than either of the first two options. As a vegan, which should you choose?

 

[Tom L.]

@Graeme M I went through the posts in this thread (rather quickly). NOWHERE did you provide any evidence that eating crickets directly would result in fewer cricket deaths than from raising vegan food crops. If you did, I missed it.

Your argument inherently needs quantified evidence to support it- not statements like:

The question I asked wasn't about hypotheticals. It was quite precise. As far as I can see, in the case I offered as an example, it is very much better to eat the crickets if by veganism we mean a personal ethical position. To say why it wouldn't be, you would have to show that in this particular case more harm is done to do so. No-one has. Or, you would have to assume a blindly ideological position, which is largely what most commenters have done.

I think I CAN show that it is better to eat the crickets. I have advanced evidence for that. I might be wrong because I have not exhaustively researched the data........ I think on the evidence to hand, that is exactly the case.

If it was "quite precise", then where is the numeric data supporting it? If it's not "hypothetical", then where is your precise, documented, quantitative data comparing deaths of crickets in fields (which I know happens) to eating them directly?

Just to explain myself one more time. All I am asking is the simple question - if it seems likely beyond reasonable doubt that eating farmed crickets from an ethical and sustainable small business causes less harm than eating plants instead,

Why does it "seem likely" to you?

I admit I find your logic hard to follow. I can only do what I can to minimise harm. If I am reasonably confident that eating food grown in commercial agriculture has a greater harm than eating the crickets, isn't my choice to eat the crickets seeking to minimise deaths?

Remember, the question never was about me, it is about whether some act that anyone might undertake is consistent with veganism.

If, as seems evident, many insects are killed in commercial crop farming and that form of agriculture is generally destructive of the natural environment, what do you recommend a vegan to do? You say a vegan would advocate for ways to minimise deaths, which is fine. But what can one DO, right now in the world we have, to minimise those deaths in food choices?

If, if, if, if, if, if.........

To answer your last question immediately above: how about not seeking them out or raising them for destruction/consumption?

I readily accept that insects, as well as other animals, are killed in commercial crop production- and also personal, small-scale operations. (I once mashed a considerable number of aphids to death within seconds because I didn't see them clustered on a plant. The fact that I still remember this is evidence that I do not discount or make light of it).

It matters not how "confident" you are of your position. Your argument inherently requires verifiable, quantitative data. Soooo.... where is it?

Edited to add: I'm not even vegan. I use leather shoes. This leather comes from animals (cows and steers) who are raised for their milk or meat, not for their skins. The leather is a byproduct of these operations, although it does provide a small additional profit to the livestock industries. However, since vegan philosophy and ethics explicitly excludes leather, I cannot identify as one.

 

[Tom L.]

I think it is mischaracterising my position to say I am talking hypotheticals or future cases. I was asking a very specific question on the basis of the best information I can find. As to me, I don't have any particular concern about whether I eat crickets or not. The genesis for my question is that I was talking about this with several other people, all of whom were surprised by the fact that a person who is "vegan" would eat crickets.

A vegan would not deliberately eat crickets, although most plant foods do contain insect fragments. I'm pretty sure the FDA has set some sort of limit on contaminants such this, though.

The question I asked wasn't about hypotheticals. It was quite precise. As far as I can see, in the case I offered as an example, it is very much better to eat the crickets if by veganism we mean a personal ethical position. To say why it wouldn't be, you would have to show that in this particular case more harm is done to do so. No-one has. Or, you would have to assume a blindly ideological position, which is largely what most commenters have done.

Plant-based eating is not without harms. Those harms can be considerable, but they are orders of magnitude worse if we include insects. I wouldn't personally bother even vaguely comparing cows to insects, but no-one here has offered any clear opinion on why the life of an insect is worth less than the life of a cow. I can offer good, empirically motivated reasons for my view, but the general trend of opinion here has been the precautionary one - they are animals and probably are sentient. If so, we are in a bit of a bind but as best I can tell, people here want to consider insects in very similar ways to cows morally but then to discount insects in favour of cows. I don't disagree, I just don't follow the reasoning. But I wasn't really asking about that, I was asking about insects alone.

We are on more equitable grounds when we compare an insect with an insect. Whatever their status as sentient beings, we can reasonable claim that all insects should be considered relatively equal. If that is the case, then we should be able to make a moral calculation about whether eating plants is better than crickets. Sure, the question is somewhat like that of arguing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, but in reality I do not care about whether you or I should eat crickets. The question is about whether vegans are genuine in their moral calculus or just blind hypocrites. So far, it isn't looking good for the former possibility.

Okay- these arguments are reasonable. I've devised a sort of "sliding scale" with this sort of thing. Yes- there is less evidence for sentience in insects than there is in (for example) mammals, and I've seen arguments to the effect that insects are not sentient. But they act in ways that convince me they might be sentient to a degree, so I try not to harm them. I just try harder with animals who generally show more evidence of sentience.

I wouldn't say I consider insects in very similar ways to cows morally, since I have no doubt that cows are sentient. In fact, I used to be a pescatarian, eating cold-blooded animals in addition to plants. But over time I decided it was necessary to stop eating all animals.

 

[Graeme M]

A vegan would not deliberately eat crickets, although most plant foods do contain insect fragments. I'm pretty sure the FDA has set some sort of limit on contaminants such this, though.


Okay- these arguments are reasonable. I've devised a sort of "sliding scale" with this sort of thing. Yes- there is less evidence for sentience in insects than there is in (for example) mammals, and I've seen arguments to the effect that insects are not sentient. But they act in ways that convince me they might be sentient to a degree, so I try not to harm them. I just try harder with animals who generally show more evidence of sentience.

I wouldn't say I consider insects in very similar ways to cows morally, since I have no doubt that cows are sentient. In fact, I used to be a pescatarian, eating cold-blooded animals in addition to plants. But over time I decided it was necessary to stop eating all animals.

Tom, I was asking this question in the context of insects alone. Sentience is hard to prove one way or the other, but it's reasonable to think that organisms that can display adaptive behaviours probably are sentient. I'm not sure just how much insects can vary behaviours in response to novel situations; my guess is not that much really. However, I was more curious about how vegans view the inherent moral value of comparable creatures (in this case, insects).

To an extent, I was ignorant as I thought veganism was primarily concerned with the harm, suffering and killing of other animals for human purposes. As has been explained here, the problem of commodification and exploitation is the greater ethical concern according to vegan ethical views, so my question is perhaps a bit moot on those grounds. That is, we should worry more about the farming of insects for food than the killing of insects to grow food.

In terms of harm, my point was that when we compare sentient insects killed to grow crops with insects killed to eat directly, we have a pretty level playing field. I felt that we should take the path with the least harm and on the basis of what evidence I could find it was probably better to eat ethically farmed crickets. I still think that is true.

I remain a little unclear as to just what extent typical vegans give weight to animal suffering and deaths, if exploitation is the main concern. Does farming of itself outweigh moral concern about animal suffering and death? I'm not clear about that. Many vegans argue against eating oysters on the basis they are living animals, so a vegan wouldn't go and crack open an oyster and eat it. Those are free living animals so the problem of exploitation doesn't seem to raise its head. Yet those same vegans would eat plants that are grown in systems in which millions of free living animals at least as sentient as oysters are killed.

In fact, as best I can see, it makes much better moral sense to catch your own oysters or fish or hunt your own deer than to buy commercially grown plant foods. Unless of course we have some good grounds for valuing the life of one deer over the lives of thousands of insects. In the end, this thread opened my eyes to the problem of exploitation/commodification as an element of vegan ethics, but I remain confused about why the moral calculus ignores insect deaths in crops when other choices seem less harmful. It seems to boil down to the fact that the original vegan society just made it the case that vegans don't eat animals.

 

[Tom L.]

(quote: Graeme M) Tom, I was asking this question in the context of insects alone. Sentience is hard to prove one way or the other, but it's reasonable to think that organisms that can display adaptive behaviours probably are sentient. I'm not sure just how much insects can vary behaviours in response to novel situations; my guess is not that much really. However, I was more curious about how vegans view the inherent moral value of comparable creatures (in this case, insects).(/quote)

I somewhat addressed this above (my "sliding scale" statement).

To an extent, I was ignorant as I thought veganism was primarily concerned with the harm, suffering and killing of other animals for human purposes. As has been explained here, the problem of commodification and exploitation is the greater ethical concern according to vegan ethical views, so my question is perhaps a bit moot on those grounds. That is, we should worry more about the farming of insects for food than the killing of insects to grow food.

In terms of harm, my point was that when we compare sentient insects killed to grow crops with insects killed to eat directly, we have a pretty level playing field. I felt that we should take the path with the least harm and on the basis of what evidence I could find it was probably better to eat ethically farmed crickets. I still think that is true.

Again, I'm not seeing a "pretty level playing field". In the absence of precise quantified insect mortality data, my natural inclination is to assume that intentionally killing and eating insects will cause a higher death toll than killing them in the course of other activities. I can't, for the life of me, figure out where this "data" will come from- since people generally give insects no thought whatsoever, unless said insects are being "pests"- and then the humans are intent only on eliminating the bugs.

I remain a little unclear as to just what extent typical vegans give weight to animal suffering and deaths, if exploitation is the main concern. Does farming of itself outweigh moral concern about animal suffering and death? I'm not clear about that. Many vegans argue against eating oysters on the basis they are living animals, so a vegan wouldn't go and crack open an oyster and eat it. Those are free living animals so the problem of exploitation doesn't seem to raise its head. Yet those same vegans would eat plants that are grown in systems in which millions of free living animals at least as sentient as oysters are killed.

WHOA- say what? How does the problem of exploitation not raise its head when an animal is being killed and eaten, whether the animal is free-living or not? I don't think I'm clear on how you're defining "exploitation" just above. I define it as "intentionally causing distress or death to an animal in the course of getting some sort of benefit from that animal". Granted, insects being killed in a crop field might not be "exploited" in my definition- but they are being harmed, since the land they're living on would not be periodically devastated by machinery- and to reiterate, I'm not making light of this. I was looking for data about this topic and once found an article that stated field mice weren't killed directly by farm machinery that often- they ran out of the way- but after the harvest, when their cover was suddenly removed and they were in plain sight to any passing raptor, fox, or cat, it was flat-out slaughter. (I think I still have the reference someplace.)

In fact, as best I can see, it makes much better moral sense to catch your own oysters or fish or hunt your own deer than to buy commercially grown plant foods. Unless of course we have some good grounds for valuing the life of one deer over the lives of thousands of insects. In the end, this thread opened my eyes to the problem of exploitation/commodification as an element of vegan ethics, but I remain confused about why the moral calculus ignores insect deaths in crops when other choices seem less harmful. It seems to boil down to the fact that the original vegan society just made it the case that vegans don't eat animals.

Again: I am not seeing this. If I have to choose, I value deer over insects partly because there is far more evidence for a deer's sentience as opposed to an insect's (specifically, a deer's brain has a cortex; insects have cerebral ganglia)- and, yes, partly because I know from experience that it is almost immeasurably more difficult to avoid killing insects unintentionally than to avoid killing mammals.

Consider this hypothetical, entirely-imaginary, and kinda silly scenario: You're driving a car. A human, dog, deer, or whomever suddenly jumps out in front of you- and freezes in terror. You have time to turn the steering wheel and run off the road into some tall grass, coming safely to a stop- BUT- you know there are animals, and maybe humans, unseen in that tall grass. So you run over the hapless being in the road. Does this seem logical to you?

ETA: GRRR. ARGH. I somehow messed up my attempt to quote you at the beginnng of this post, although the rest of the quotes are intact. But I think the meaning is still clear.
ETA Again: If we're going to consider animal deaths caused by raising crops for human consumption, shouldn't we also consider animals killed incidentally in the production of fodder for the animals? We might logically ignore this in the case of grass-fed animals, but grass-fed appears not to be the norm. When I see meat advertized as "grass-fed", I'm assuming that this is meant to imply that this is not the norm- otherwise why would it be mentioned?

 

[Graeme M]

Again, I'm not seeing a "pretty level playing field". In the absence of precise quantified insect mortality data, my natural inclination is to assume that intentionally killing and eating insects will cause a higher death toll than killing them in the course of other activities.

Well, I included various calculations aimed at illustrating my argument. I used estimates of insect mortality in crop farming as proposed by Fischer & Lamey (2018) and estimated how many crickets I might eat in a year. Bear in mind I was talking about a specific case, not some generalised global situation. The level playing field I referred to is that we are not really talking about possible differences in sentience . Because we really don't know about insects, we are probably safe to assume that we can regard all insects as subjects of a life (at least, in terms of vegan ethics - I am less convinced of that). I calculated that I might cause the death of perhaps 15-20,000 crickets in a year. Using F&L's numbers which were based on prior research, it seems I could be causing the death of as many as 25 million insects to eat chickpeas instead. My conclusion wasn't that the case is proven but rather that on the evidence to hand, there seems to be a good argument to eat the crickets, IF our concern is the number of animals killed or the extent of suffering.

I don't think I'm clear on how you're defining "exploitation" just above.

I agree. I'm not sure what exploitation means. Exploitation can just mean making use of resources, which of course is what we do to live. Growing crops, mining lithium, damming rivers, all of this is exploitation. On the other hand, exploitation can be using someone without just and fair reward. In that regard, growing the crickets doesn't seem exploitative because they are fed and housed and kept safe. And killing them doesn't seem exploitative because they no longer exist - one cannot be exploited if one does not exist. Is it exploitation to kill someone for what you can get from them? I don't know. It might be wrong to kill Bob to take his land, but I am not sure we'd describe that as exploitation. Still, when I posed my question I wasn't aware of the extent to which exploitation is perhaps the primary concern of veganism. If so then farming crickets is wrong over and above their killing. However, if we are primarily concerned by what is best to do when we take also into account pain and suffering, then my point here is at what point does that moral concern outweight exploitation? Is it best not to farm crickets because that is exploitation, even though we might cause pain, suffering and death to 25 times as many animals to do otherwise?

If I have to choose, I value deer over insects partly because there is far more evidence for a deer's sentience as opposed to an insect's (specifically, a deer's brain has a cortex; insects have cerebral ganglia)

I am suspicious that here you are conflating sentience with cognition. A deer can make display more dynamic behaviours because it cognates upon more information. But sentience is the capacity to perceive the world - we tend not to perceive our thoughts. Cognition is largely unconscious. And perception is a very limited thing. We can detect certain external and internal properties but these are a pretty small set. Perhaps heat, cold, pain, imagery, sounds, internal bodily states (emotions) and a few others. At the end of the day, the internal sentient state is a model of the organisms relationship with the world. Is the modelled world of an insect somehow less valid to the orgnism than that of the deer? Sure the deer does more with the information (actually I think that's questionable), but if an organism is aware of the world and can behave correspondingly, what is the basis for deciding that its model is less important than another's? That it is less complex? Do we have some useful objective measures for that?

Like you I think a deer has a greater sentient capacity than an insect, but being honest with myself I think that's largely just because I think smarter brains are more important. Hence I am important. But if sentience is a mundane property of the universe we might have to rethink that idea. I suspect that it is just that it's soothing to think that somehow, the experience of large animals which are messy to kill is more important than the experience and unseen suffering of small animals.

Consider this hypothetical, entirely-imaginary, and kinda silly scenario: You're driving a car. A human, dog, deer, or whomever suddenly jumps out in front of you- and freezes in terror. You have time to turn the steering wheel and run off the road into some tall grass, coming safely to a stop- BUT- you know there are animals, and maybe humans, unseen in that tall grass. So you run over the hapless being in the road. Does this seem logical to you?

Sorry, I am not quite following. This seems to be a variation of the trolley car problem. I don't think trolley car problems resolve ethical conundrums.

If we're going to consider animal deaths caused by raising crops for human consumption, shouldn't we also consider animals killed incidentally in the production of fodder for the animals? We might logically ignore this in the case of grass-fed animals, but grass-fed appears not to be the norm. When I see meat advertized as "grass-fed", I'm assuming that this is meant to imply that this is not the norm- otherwise why would it be mentioned?

Yes I agree. My question was unrelated to this problem. It absolutely must be the case that taken overall, vastly more animals currently die to grow animals for food than are killed to grow crops for food, if largely due to the large proportion of crops fed to animals. The question was not about that, it was about the moral calculus for one person right now to choose what foods to eat. As I mentioned above, my argument also extends to hunting one's own food - if my argument carries through it is less harmful to hunt a deer than to eat chickpeas. In terms of vegan ethics, what matters there is whether it is exploitative to kill the deer and whether there is any point at which the sheer weight of death and suffering outweighs the ethical cost of exploitation of the deer. Clearly in terms of numbers of deaths it is better to kill the deer.

 

[Tom L.]

I didn't read the Fischer & Lamey article from 2018; I vaguely remembered something similar from about 2 decades ago, which I thought jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions (although it did make a valid point that even vegan food production involves the deaths of animals). I might look for it. But if I basically find the same nonsense that I read 20 years ago, I'll be ******-off about wasting my time (although I think I do waste too much time anyway- I'd just rather waste it on something else).

 

[Tom L.]

I started reading the Fischer/Lamey essay, but haven't gotten through it. I did read the abstract, which summarizes the piece, but I'll still want to read and digest the whole thing.

 

[Graeme M]

I started reading the Fischer/Lamey essay, but haven't gotten through it. I did read the abstract, which summarizes the piece, but I'll still want to read and digest the whole thing.

F&L have some other essays on this matter. Generally speaking, their view is that there isn't sufficient empirical data to settle the question of harvest deaths in croplands, but it is almost certainly true that it is far more harmful to raise animals for food in current business as usual systems than to grow crops, simply because fewer animals are harmed. Steven Davis' article (which is the one I think you referred to earlier) wasn't bad, though people claim to have identified flaws in his methodology. I'm not so sure about that, though. After all, if we don't have empirical data it is hard to say that he IS wrong.

However, in this discussion I am not tackling the issue of collateral deaths from harvesting. These may or may not be significant. What I AM tackling is the problem of small animals including invertebrates being harmed deliberately from pest control. Even small animals such as mice are killed in vast numbers here in Australia when there are mouse plagues, and we have to be honest and agree that it is because we grow crops. But when we include insects, the numbers become staggering. When farmers spray crops to kill or deter insects, they don't do it in the expectation it will only kill some small percentage of the pests. They expect to largely eradicate them. F&L offer claims of very large numbers of insects per hectare. Presumably, while there are many species present, only some are the target of poisons and other pest control methods. Nonetheless, if there are really 250 million insects present in one hectare of crops, even the killing of just 0.1% represents some 250,000 insect deaths on one hectare in a year. F&L made a very conservative estimate in relation to "sentient" insects, but that estimate is based on nothing at all. It might be that only some insects feel pain, but it may be true that ALL insects are subjects of a life simply because something like sentience may accompany any creature with a nervous system that contains important functional nodes. Sentience isn't ONLY the ability to feel pain.

While I am not especially moved by insect deaths, vegans DO argue that those who are subjects of a life deserve our moral consideration. This is why vegans tend to proscribe eating of oysters. In my case, if it is true that very large numbers of insects are killed each year to grow crops and I can cause fewer deaths to eat farmed crickets, then I think we have a clear moral duty to place some weight on that fact. And if we think oysters may be sentient enough to deserve consideration than I think we are on safe grounds to assume insects are at least as sentient.

I think it is hard to say why it is wrong to kill some animals for food directly but not to kill other animals for food indirectly. In both cases we really are killing animals in order to provide food. If the numbers are large enough, how can we reasonably ignore them? Is it only because in one system we exploit them but not in the other? You have argued that killing an animal to benefit us is exploitation - doesn't it follow that killing insects to benefit from the crops something similar? After all, if we didn't clear the land and grow the crops, wouldn't those insects have simply lived natural lives without our interference? I don't know the answer to this, I am just raising the problem. I don't think we should let our worry about insects overwhelm our worry about caged hens, for example, but I am not the one arguing that all subjects of a life deserve moral consideration.

If F&L are right that 20,000 sentient insects are killed per hectare per year on croplands, then overall, a plant-based food system would cause over 24 trillion animal deaths per year. That is a lot of animal deaths.

 

[Lou]

Do I dare?
This again?

The rise of ‘ento-veganism’: how eating crickets could help save the world

They are a great source of protein and taste like beef or lamb when cooked. So are our kitchens and restaurants finally ready for the insect revolution?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Graeme M]

Looks like the insect farming thing hasn't really done much since 2022 and the article doesn't add that much to the conversation in the sense that I think much of this was previously discussed? My original feeling was that IF it's less harmful to eat crickets than say soy, it might be best to eat the crickets. But I guess my thinking has changed a little since then. The main thing I found is that it's impossible to know just how many insects are killed to grow crops. A lot, seems to be the answer, but who knows? I also have sort of taken the stance now that the main aim of veganism/animal rights is to prevent the unfair use of other animals, in particular by regarding them as property and a mere means of production. Which is what cricket farming is doing. In other words, I don't think veganism is specifically about reducing suffering.

Then there is the problem of sentience. I think veganism doesn't really make sense if it's just the idea we never eat an "animal", even if the animal is an oyster. For me, the animals that count are those that are sufficiently sentient to be subjects of a life, or at least to suffer from pain. Do insects? Not really in most cases, maybe in some, seems to be the current thinking. I don't know about crickets; I suspect they are not subjects of a life but they do feel pain. Some research suggests they feel something like pain. Does farming them and freezing them to death cause them to suffer? I do not know, but I guess we might want to be cautious. Still, on the whole probably it is less bad to farm them than to kill them in cropping, at least in terms of pain and suffering, but it might be less fair to farm them for reasons I mentioned above.

In the end, I think unless there is compelling evidence that vastly more sentient insects suffer and are killed to grow crops, we are probably better to eat plants than insects. I don't think we have that evidence. It's still a bit of a lineball call for me.

I guess I would say it's not as wrong to farm crickets as cows, but it's more wrong than growing plants.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

I think the possibility that insects have no or little sentience (self awareness and ability to suffer pain) has to be balanced against the fact that you are causing a greater number of beings to suffer and die versus eating a chicken or cow (hundreds of dead beings perhaps for one meal with insects). So it's not even clear to me that eating insects is even better than eating chickens or cows let alone better than eating plants.

I'd certainly prefer you eat 1 cricket to 1 chicken, but that 1 cricket hasn't filled you up. The real comparison is what's worse 100s crickets vs 1 chicken.

If you could prove that sentience only occurs above a certain level (i.e. only animals with more than x neurons can feel pain) and prove that insects have zero consciousness or emotions or pain, then it would seem OK to eat them, or at least better than with animals. But is seems very unlikely we will be able to prove this. It's also possible that consciousness is more of a continuum and even insects have a a bit of it. As far as I've heard in some podcasts, there isn't a consensus on this among experts (e.g. neuroscientists).

 

[Lou]

Me. I think the only pro-eating-insects argument is sustainability. or efficiency. But so far what I've gleaned is that it's still better to just eat plants.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

If you get your windscreen covered in bugs, perhaps scoop them up on save on dinner. That should be a sustainable diet.

 

[silva]

It's naive to think that farming insects won't create gmo breeds that will escape and cause as much destruction as any other non native species. The propensity of allergens, as well as weird microbial and fungal diseases.....

Insect farming: our three biggest concerns with the rapidly growing sector

Did you know that several insects are authorised for farming in Europe? Insect farms are on the rise in the EU, and the growth of the sector has been rapid, with trillions of insects set to be farmed by 2030. Not only is insect welfare not being taken into account as this sector explodes, but...

www.eurogroupforanimals.org