The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: rangerrebew on March 26, 2023, 11:45:21 am
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Insect Farming Is Booming. But Is It Cruel?
More than a trillion insects are raised each year as high-protein, low-carbon animal feed, but the practice might have an ethical blind spot.
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.
It’s a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?
https://www.wired.com/story/insect-farming-sentience/
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bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis
Ya lost me right there.
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Doesn't matter. The things that are going to replace the current economy for the future 'green economy' are never going to be allowed to happen.
The environuts will protest it, and it will never come to fruition, and you will starve.
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There is no climate crisis. It’s climate change. It’s been a natural part of Earth since creation
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There is no climate crisis. It’s climate change. It’s been a natural part of Earth since creation
:amen:
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Kamaji quoted from the article:
"bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis"
Anyone seeing a subtle but significant change here?
From "global warming"
to
"Climate change",
and now, even that is modified further to:
"Climate crisis"...
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There is no climate crisis. It’s climate change. It’s been a natural part of Earth since creation
Yep. 4.6 Billion years of climate change and they can stop it for just $19.00/month...