Ethical issues in lethal insect monitoring.

Animal monitoring involves acquiring information about animals or their activities. Changes in available monitoring technologies, global biodiversity, and sociocultural norms have raised novel ethical challenges for biologists engaged in animal monitoring, including efforts aimed at monitoring insects. A growing amount of attention has been paid to the ethical challenges associated with lethal insect monitoring to include unclear environmental risks, welfare harms to insects, concerns about taking life, and more.

Grinding as a slaughter method for farmed black soldier fly () larvae: Empirical recommendations to achieve instantaneous killing.

At least 200 billion black soldier fly () larvae (BSFL) are reared each year as food and feed, and the insect farming industry is projected to grow rapidly. Despite interest by consumers, producers, and legislators, no empirical evidence exists to guide producers in practicing humane - or instantaneous - slaughter for these novel mini-livestock. BSFL may be slaughtered via freezing, boiling, grinding, or other methods; however standard operating procedures (SOPs) and equipment design may affect the likelihood of instantaneous death using these methods.

Animal welfare: Methods to improve policy and practice.

New methods are emerging to quantify human and animal welfare on a common scale, creating new tools for policy.

Challenges in farmed insect welfare: Beyond the question of sentience.

The global Insects as Food and Feed (IAFF) industry currently farms over a trillion individual insects a year and is growing rapidly. Intensive animal production systems are known to cause a range of negative affective states in livestock; given the potential scale of the IAFF industry, it is urgent to consider the welfare of the industry's insect livestock. The majority of the literature on farmed insect welfare has focused on: (i) establishing that insect welfare ought to be of concern; or (ii) extending vertebrate welfare frameworks to insects.

Internally Triggered Experiences of Hedonic Valence in Nonhuman Animals: Cognitive and Welfare Considerations.

Do any nonhuman animals have hedonically valenced experiences not directly caused by stimuli in their current environment? Do they, like us humans, experience anticipated or previously experienced pains and pleasures as respectively painful and pleasurable? We review evidence from comparative neuroscience about hippocampus-dependent simulation in relation to this question. Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and theta oscillations have been found to instantiate previous and anticipated experiences. These hippocampal activations coordinate with neural reward and fear centers as well as sensory and cortical areas in ways that are associated with conscious episodic mental imagery in humans.

Hybrid theories, psychological plausibility, and the human/animal divide.

A hybrid theory is any moral theory according to which different classes of individuals ought to be treated according to different principles. We argue that some hybrid theories are able to meet standards of psychological plausibility, by which we mean that it's feasible for ordinary human beings to understand and act in accord with them. Insofar as psychological plausibility is a theoretical virtue, then, such hybrid theories deserve more serious consideration.

Animal Agriculture, Wet Markets, and COVID-19: a Case Study in Indirect Activism.

There were excellent reasons to reform intensive animal agriculture prior to COVID-19. Unfortunately, though, intensive animal agriculture has grown rapidly over the last century. All signs indicate that it will continue to grow in the future.

Animal Harms and Food Production: Informing Ethical Choices.

Ethical food choices have become an important societal theme in post-industrial countries. Many consumers are particularly interested in the animal welfare implications of the various foods they may choose to consume. However, concepts in animal welfare are rapidly evolving towards consideration of all animals (including wildlife) in contemporary approaches such as "One Welfare".

Don't Demean "Invasives": Conservation and Wrongful Species Discrimination.

It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as "invasive". We argue that the classification of any species as "invasive" constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals-assuming that conservationists "kill equally".