Scientific Paper Review: Insects May Or May Not Be Sentient??

Scientific Paper Review: Insects may or may not be sentient??

Reading this (https://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/epdf/10.3920/JIFF2022.0041?role=tab) paper about welfare when farming black soldier flies (published 2023) with the main author being Meghan Barret, who is a super duper cool female scientist that believes strongly in insect welfare (e-portfolio link here: http://meghan-barrett.com/about-me/), and I'm astonished!

Introduction starts off with a quick overview of what the paper is getting into and then dives into background history. I love reading scientific papers simply because there is so much cool stuff to learn. Animal welfare is dependent upon how the animal views how it's doing. A pampered lap dog with depression still has depression. A sad bug living in a super duper cool vivarium (which are way hard to set up) is still sad.

Insects in science may or may not be sentient. How do you define sentient? Where do you draw the line of responding to making decisions? Wild! If insects are sentient we should, of course, treat them like we are. If they aren't how do we determine welfare for something that's not sentient. This isn't about philosophy though so we're continuing on.

There is a model called the five freedoms model. The paper said it best so I'm quoting them here, "According to that influential model of animals’ interests (Brambell, 1965), animals ought to kept in ways that keep them free: (1) from hunger and thirst; (2) from discomfort; (3) from pain, injury, and disease; (4) to express normal behaviour; and (5) from fear and distress.".

From here the introduction continues to go on to explain that it's hard to tell when an insect is doing or has this stuff. If a pet cat decides to be a picky eater, is the owner a bad owner for not keeping them free from hunger and thirst or is the cat being picky? Again though! Not hear for philosophy or ethics that's been discussed a hundred times before.

What can be determined though is if something kills an insect it is bad. If it increases mortality, like a parasite would, it is bad. Good thing is that factors between farmed invertabra (aka bugs) is pretty universal. Another good news is we know a lot about the biology of the black soldier fly! They have six larva stages.

That concludes this part of the post! More coming soon.

Look at this thing! Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection is started?

I made this. Well, not the outline. I got that off of a different flower and then filled it in. I'm officially one drawing into however many I do until I die. Congrats me! I spent like two hours figuring out how colors work. I'm still not sure about all of it but it's done now!

Do NOT release pets into the wilderness even if, like axolotl's, they will be dead soon due to not being good at enviromental changes!!

Toxic yaoi, not necessarily a ship but toxic af

I spend too much time doing this lol

Based on the pages of journal 3

Absolutely stunning! I have to go watch some star lore now.

Memento Vivere

Some additional notes:

I'm despearte enough!

This is the magic lucky word count. Reblog for creativity juice. It might even work, who knows.

Ocean

go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish