But not everyone is lining up to crunch on crickets. Despite entmophagy’s many promises, one group of conscientious consumers remains nervously ambivalent: vegans. On the face of things, the question seems moot. Vegans don’t eat animals; insects are animals; vegans therefore don’t eat insects. End of story. But this simple little syllogism betrays the very real possibility that vegans, by virtue of their quest to reduce animal suffering, may not only be permitted to eat insects—they may be obligated to do so. THIS ARGUMENT BEGINS WITH an agricultural reality that we too often ignore: the untold number of sentient animals killed to grow and harvest edible crops. Farmers routinely unleash an arsenal of agricultural weaponry upon unquestionably sentient “pests”—squirrels, rabbits, mice, moles, voles, deer, wolves, and coyote—who compete for cultivated calories. Come harvest time, combines and harvesters unavoidably shred millions of self-aware critters who creep among the crops. The suffering that’s required to bring seemingly “humane” foods to our plate is thereby just as palpable as the suffering of those animals slaughtered to feed us chicken, pork, and beef. [...] THERE IS, OF COURSE, a temptation to dismiss the dilemma altogether by insisting that insects are sentient creatures—that is to say, that they can suffer. But the evidence on this point is flimsy at best. While the question of insect sentience has produced a minefield of disagreement among scientists and philosophers, even the most dogged supporters of the proposition (such as Jeffrey Lockwood, an entomologist who has his graduate students anesthetize insects before experimenting on them) concede that there’s no hard evidence to support the prospect of insect suffering—unlike the suffering of mammals incidentally killed for plant production. Other entomologists insist that the idea of insect suffering is totally implausible. Hans Smid, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, is an expert on the brains of parasitic wasps, which are some of the most behaviorally sophisticated insects on Earth. “I am absolutely convinced,” he told the Washington Post, “that insects do not feel pain.” Robert Elwood, a professor of the biological sciences at Queens University in Belfast, notes that pain would provide insects no evolutionary advantages. “From an evolutionary perspective,” he told the Post, the only reason for pain that makes sense to me is that it enables long-term protection.” The average lifespan of a field cricket is a few weeks—its protection, in essence, comes from its remarkable reproductive efficiency, not its ability to learn from mistakes.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 04:13:03 +0000
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