The Nonlinear Library: EA Forum
Education
EA - A Primer for Insect Sentience and Welfare (as of Sept 2023) by Meghan Barrett
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Primer for Insect Sentience and Welfare (as of Sept 2023), published by Meghan Barrett on September 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post was written by me, Meghan Barrett, in my independent capacity as an academic research scientist and entomologist. None of the organizations with which I'm affiliated should be taken to endorse or support any particular conclusions or resources listed herein based on this post.IntroductionIf you attended my talk at EAG London in May 2023, you may remember this basic narrative:Insects might matter morally. There are a lot of them. We can use scientific evidence to make their lives better.This is the quick case I provide for working on insect welfare. Since that talk, I've been encouraged by the amount of interest in the topic among members of the EA community, so many of whom want to learn about insects and their welfare in farmed, wild, and research contexts. The lives and capabilities of our planet's ~5.5 million species of insects are often surprising and quite poorly understood (even by entomologists!), which can lead us all to make empirically-unsupported assumptions about their sentience, capacity for welfare, and welfare concerns. Although there are many significant unknowns in the science of insect sentience and welfare, it is clear that if we want to help insects, we need to learn what we can about them.Lots of advocates are doing just that: they're putting in the work to understand insects' nervous systems, behavior, and physiology - as well as the scale and contexts of their use and management. I'm heartened to see people take insects seriously. So, as an insect neurobiologist and physiologist by training, I want to do my part to make it easier to learn about these fascinating, diverse, and highly neglected animals.This post is a quick, non-exhaustive, and lightly-annotated list of resources that can serve as a primer for folks interested in getting up to speed on insect pain, sentience, and welfare as of September 2023. For future readers, it also points toward some places where people can go for the most recent information on insect welfare and sentience.I hope this guide is useful for introducing you to the topic - and for demonstrating that there is a lot of rigorous empirical, or otherwise expert, conversation currently happening on the topics of insect sentience and welfare.Quick caveatsThe welfare-focused work on this list (as compared to the pain and sentience research) is skewed toward the work of Rethink Priorities, my collaborators' publications, and my own efforts. I'm obviously biased, but I think these folks have done much of the most rigorous work in the space to date.The list is biased towards biological information over, say, economic models or philosophical considerations. I'm a biologist. It's also probably biased towards neurobiology and physiology over, say, ethology (though I've tried hard to include behavioral resources, too).The list is intentionally non-exhaustive - it's a primer, not a research database (if you want that, check out this link here) - so you shouldn't expect these resources to provide a complete overview of everything you might need to contribute meaningfully to the conversation on insect sentience or welfare.This list won't be updated regularly. It's the list 'as of September 2023'. The insect welfare and sentience space is starting to move faster, so this may be seriously out of date within a year or two.Not all work on this list is peer-reviewed (at least in the traditional, academic sense).Inclusion doesn't equal endorsement. Instead, inclusion on this list is an expression of confidence that either (1) there's something of value to the work conducted therein or (2) it is an important part of the history and debate of the discipline.Insect Sentienc...
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free