'Minilivestock': Is Farming Insects A Solution To Agriculture's Problems?
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Faunalytics
June 2018

Animal farming is among the most ecologically harmful of all human activities. Could farming insects, dubbed "minilivestock," help solve some of the food problems on the horizon?

Humans have eaten insects for millenia. Even today, people in Italy and Croatia treat cheese infested with maggots, for example, as a delicacy. While the spread of organized religion and colonialism may have caused most Western societies to view insect-eating as disgusting and uncivilized today, small movements in some Western countries are trying to reclaim the practice. This study reviews the arguments for using insects as our main source of protein, rather than other animals or plants.

It’s worth noting that, from an animal advocacy perspective, the researchers do not wade into the ethical issues of farming insects. There is room to explore the ethical trade-off between a diet based on protein from insects vs. a diet based on protein from conventional animals used for food, for people who insist on animal proteins in their diet. Do insects have a lesser degree of sentience than larger animals? Does the capacity to suffer correspond with sentience? Does the capacity to suffer determine how we should treat animals morally?

Read more at 'Minilivestock': Is Farming Insects A Solution To Agriculture’s Problems?

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