First, they didn’t want you to eat meat.

Then they decided that farming plants, too, causes global warming. Hence the farmer protests in Europe.

Now they even are questioning the ethics of farming insects.

Dirt. You must eat dirt. Except, perhaps, that too is unethical, because dirt has microbes.

Insects are strange, wondrous beings. Butterflies can see parts of the light spectrum that are invisible to human eyes and use these ultraviolet patterns to find their way to tasty plants. Moths use the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves on journeys of hundreds of miles. Bees waggle their butts to tell their hive-mates where to find a juicy stash of nectar. Insects live in our world—or humans live in theirs—yet we inhabit completely different sensory universes.

But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.

I have to admit that I was unfamiliar with the fact that insect farming is a large-scale thing. My own relationship with insects is more along the lines of acting as an executioner than a breeder, and I admit that I am just as happy to keep it that way.

Every year we are inundated with flies, box elder bugs, Japanese beetles, and other lovelies that invade our house, eat our garden, and buzz around my food. I am deadly allergic to bees, against whom I hold no grudge, and wasps, against whom I hold a nasty grudge. I fight the fleas who try to infest my cats and lay ant traps to control the little buggers entering my home.

I admit to indifference regarding the ethics of my murderous ways, because they are bugs, and God breeds them by the trillions.

“We’re at the starting point of a conversation about insect welfare,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics. One of the key questions here is whether insects are sentient and have the capacity to feel pain and suffer. Pigs, chickens, and fish are already widely recognized as sentient. In 2021, Birch wrote a report that led to the UK government recognizing sentience in squid and octopuses, as well as crabs, lobsters, and all vertebrate animals. Research on insect sentience is much more patchy. There are more than a million known insect species and only a handful have ever been studied to see whether they can feel pain.

I will admit to moral qualms about killing larger animals, although I happily eat hamburgers with bacon and cheese, and chicken is regularly on the menu. Boeuf Bourguignon is a fave, and ribeyes are proof that God exists.

Still, I abhor cruelty to animals and sobbed uncontrollably when my parrot Rocky died. I still can’t enter his room, 6 months after his passing. So I am not exactly hard-hearted, and my speciesism while real is tempered by empathy for sentient animals. I feel a bit sad for the cow that died for my pleasure.

Then I take a bite of a burger and move on.

But insects? Really? Do I have to worry about the welfare of insects? Sure, I care about worms and pollinators, but mosquitos can die off entirely and the world would be a better place.

The harsh reality is that almost all life depends upon the consumption of living things. We can create an exception for plants, I suppose, but those peaceful herbivores eat plants. Carnivores eat Carne Asada, among other things. Should we hunt all the predators to extinction?

What is an ethical person to do?

Die, of course. You are to die.

Perhaps this is why civilizations die after Golden Ages. Wealth creates a softness in people that makes them incapable of even self-preservation. We get fat and happy, and soon after we become fat and unhappy.

Never in human history has any society been as prosperous as our own, and yet the most privileged among us are the most unhappy and mentally ill. We invent things to panic about and then…panic.

I wonder the same thing https://t.co/lbqylKIMrw

— Sam Antha (@SamanthaLives1) March 13, 2023

I am sure that insects play an important role in the cycle of life. Edward O. Wilson tells me so, and as long as he isn’t going on about the climate he is pretty smart.

But unless they are doing something good for human beings and our welfare, screw ’em.