Some have proposed that we describe this fog-bound ethical landscape in terms of what some of us would call love. Celebrated entomologist E.O. Wilson speaks of biophilia, the instinctive love of life. The word love bears its own burdens, of course. As Michael Ignatieff notes in The Needs of Strangers (which insects, to most of us, most assuredly are), “Many of the things we need most deeply in life — love chief among them — do not necessarily bring us happiness. If we need them, it is to go to the depth of our being, to learn as much of ourselves as we can stand, to be reconciled to what we find in ourselves and in those around us.”97
At least one of the “inspired by real life” fictions by veterinarian Alf White, better known as James Herriot, suggested that the author might love animals, especially dogs. Many North Americans speak without embarrassment about being dog lovers, horse lovers, and cat lovers. But can we talk about loving insects — Black flies? Mosquitoes? Bed bugs? — without drifting into vague similes and metaphors? Can we, without falling into the flake-filled pit of an imagined multiverse, create a language that incorporates and transcends the ecological tongues of pheromones, scent, color, sound, taste, and magnetism that whisper around us and connect us to all other living beings?
The notion of a love that does not necessarily bring happiness is in keeping with the approach to studying and managing ecosystems advocated by Henry Regier, member of the Order of Canada, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Toronto. In considering how we might frame initiatives around the Great Lakes Basin, Regier argues that love encompasses much of what is important for integrated assessment and management. Love, as he defines it in this context, is a complex phenomenon that includes and transcends other systemic approaches to natural phenomena, such as energetics, economics, and ecology.98
Jeffrey Lockwood and Harvey Lemelin have proposed that we embrace our conflicted sense of insects as both awful and awesome, a kind of live-and-let-live attitude that Lockwood calls entomapatheia. When it comes to insects and ecosystems in general, maybe entomapatheia is what Regier’s love, and Wilson’s biophilia, feel like. Wilson and Regier have given us some examples of how their views might work out in practice, from managing the Great Lakes Basin to conserving insect habitats.
For me, the word that approximates how I feel about the natural world, and insects in particular, is care, whose proto-Germanic etymological roots evoke ideas of lament, grief, and sorrow as well as a non-Hallmark sort of love. I care about insects as I care about all animals, even when they annoy me. They make possible the world that is cohabitable by different species, even as I lament my necessary ethical entanglements with them.
Caring about nature sounds like a good place to start, but in applying these notions of biophilia to the concept of insects as food in ecosystems, matters quickly get complicated. In other, non-entomophagy-related human–animal relationships, we have spent more than a few centuries arguing about animal consciousness, emotions, welfare, and rights, and whether, more generally, humans have any obligations toward animals — and, if so, how far those obligations might extend. The progression of our thinking in these areas has had an important influence on how we organize and regulate everything from livestock farming and research to zoos and wildlife conservation parks. Insects are, by scientific classification, animals. Do the insights and laws developed to manage our interactions with, say, cats, dogs, cows, and pigs also apply to edible insects? If so, why? And how?
If our experience with non-arthropod animals is any guide, then the regulation rubber hits the road when we talk about suffering. If animals are capable of suffering, we say, then we have some obligations to them, a basis for passing laws and promulgating regulations. But why would that be? Why does infliction of suffering lead inexorably to obligation and regulation? Unlike some other veterinarians, I have met animals — and most certainly insects — that I could only love in the non–greeting card sense suggested by Wilson, Ignatieff, and Regier, which popular culture might not recognize as love at all.
Which brings me back to care. Even when I don’t like or love an animal, I still care about it. At bottom, I don’t want to cause suffering in other animals or people because I care about them. I’ll come back in the last chapter to why we might want to care, but for now, I will assume that we do and move on to what the implications of this caring are.
In my research on entomophagy, I have not come across many people talking explicitly about ethics, or even its more familiar moral cousin, animal welfare. Jeffrey Lockwood, a trained entomologist and now Professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wyoming, whom I mentioned earlier with regard to locust plagues, is an exception. In a couple of articles in 1987 and 1988, Lockwood argued that insects deserve our moral consideration because there is sufficient evidence that they — at least the social insects — are capable of suffering.
Lockwood says that “considerable empirical evidence supports the assertion that insects feel pain and are conscious or aware of their sensations. In so far as their pain matters to them, they have an interest in not being pained and their lives are worsened by pain. Furthermore, insects as conscious beings have future (even if immediate) plans with regard to their own lives, and the death of insects frustrates these plans. In that sentience appears to be an ethically sound, scientifically viable basis for granting moral status, and in consideration of previous arguments which establish a reasonable expectation of self-awareness, planning, and pain in insects, I propose the following, minimum ethic: We ought to refrain from actions which may be reasonably expected to kill or cause nontrivial pain in insects when avoiding these actions has no, or only trivial, costs to our own welfare.”99
I was skeptical of Lockwood’s claim that insects can suffer. Nevertheless, scientific reports in the past few years (since 2013) have documented the deep similarities between vertebrate and insect “brains.” One 2016 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is titled “What Insects Can Tell Us about the Origins of Consciousness.” The authors assert that “invertebrates have long been overlooked in the study of consciousness,” and that the “time has come to take them seriously as a scientific and philosophical model for the evolution of subjective experience.”100 The Green Brain Project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK, announces that their work “combines computational neuroscience modelling, learning and decision theory, modern parallel computing methods, and robotics with data from state-of-the-art neurobiological experiments on cognition in the honeybee Apis mellifera.”101
If we can use insects to study the evolution of human consciousness and to build computational models, robots, and drones, then I suppose the notion of insect suffering is not so far-fetched after all. Still, where does this lead us? Is Lockwood on the right track?
I asked Houle about Lockwood’s ideas and, to my surprise, she was not impressed.
Maybe this is the right “moral recipe,” but nobody can actually cook with it. Here’s why. To get to the conclusion of the experience of suffering taking place, and not just conclude that what was seen (or measured with thingamabobs) was flinching, that is, mere instinct (sensation awareness) is a gigantic leap, both conceptually and empirically. If you try to make that leap you get nailed for being soft-headed (bad scientist or projecting, or both). Or maybe you do manage to rig the objective cortisone flinch-measuring thingamabob and it says “suffering is happening in cricket at time T5.” Then, in one or two moves along the graph you can find yourself proclaiming: it passes once their wings are pulled off. The problem? You need to posit a higher-order subjectivity in the being to get insects “onto” the same empirical-moral playing field as human consciousness and human suffering. That means we need to posit (or better, to prove) that insects have a sense of self and a sense of being invested in that self in a certain quality of life and over time. We are already having trouble designing and car
rying out experiments to prove, without a doubt, that this is the case with orangutans and gorillas. The empirical prerogative allows people to appear most rational if they continue to doubt the experimental evidence as proving that. So: If you don’t have this level of conviction and evidence, i.e. proof about the invisible continuous-over-a-life inside thing called self-consciousness, then a rock falling on you just hurts as it is smashing you. But you don’t (apparently) suffer because you don’t know that you are the self that didn’t want that to happen in the first place, or reflect upon the trauma after. Just bug squash.
So much research, with insects, dolphins, cats, mice, and cows is devoted to trying to figure out what quality of “awareness of sensations” they have on the inside, so to speak. We can only read the symptoms (cortisone levels rise in blood tests, facial grimaces, screams). Even then, so many people say: Oh, we can’t be sure those are the effects of a cause called pain. But the piece about establishing second-order personhood in order to then say that they suffer in order to then say what Lockwood says has so many black boxes along the way.
Houle clarified that she respected what scientists like Lockwood were trying to do — taking the empirical, scientific criteria we use to give cute kitties moral standing and asking, can this reasoning be applied to insects? But she was skeptical about empirical science being able to close any of the gaps in that argument and arrive at any firm conclusions. “Think about it,” she said to me. “I don’t even know with certainty what you are feeling. It’s all smart, bodily based, experientially informed statistically sound guesswork with a giant gesture of benefit-of-the-doubt thrown in. That last piece — benefit of the doubt (a.k.a leap of faith!) — is where things are going to slide.”
Beyond consideration for the suffering of the animals being managed and killed, there are those of us who, at least sometimes, feel complicit in whatever suffering might be inflicted by rearing and killing animals. We agonize over it. Does the killer suffer? Can this be legitimately called “suffering”? Any conscientious meat-eater, livestock owner, or slaughterhouse worker knows that, as Houle said to me, “the suffering isn’t ever ‘contained’ to the object or target but flows and leaks through all beings who inhabit that space. Life is porous. Life leaks. The human subject lives a life that slides in all directions. A feminist care perspective would say that we are all in this together, and we all can and should care about each other’s well-being; lead with our hearts, not with our heads, and that way, feeling (compassion) will be available to us and even the killers will be seen for what they are: people among people.”
I thought again about “trivial implications for human welfare.” Eating insects because doing so will feed millions of poor people, thus alleviating their suffering, and save the world from catastrophe, hardly seems trivial. In fact, these seemed like big, nontrivial loopholes, reasons to inflict pain, similar to the notion of “just wars” among many people who generally consider themselves peace-loving. When it comes to the crunch, will not human hunger always trump the welfare of crickets? Having passed through this loophole, we may not seem to be any further ahead. And yet, did not an Albert Schweitzer–like absolutism, without any loopholes, lead to its own dilemmas and, some would say, absurdities?
Having acknowledged the unresolved, and probably unresolvable, ethical quandaries faced by our relationships with insects, entomophagists still need to — and want to — make good decisions about managing and killing these small, six-legged animals. In some ways, once we accept certain animals as food, the question of how to kill them, however emotionally charged it may be, appears to be simpler. Humane slaughter — an odd turn of phrase for those not in the meat business — of livestock such as pigs and cattle has long generated controversy. Temple Grandin, the celebrated autistic animal scientist, asserts that she can see the world as an animal such as a cow might. Her work, and that of her colleagues, has led to a wide range of improvements that minimize suffering in farm animals during transport and slaughter.
Temple Grandin’s approach fits with how many insect farmers treat the humane killing of insects. The question becomes one of how to minimize pain and, insofar as we can tell, suffering. Some would say boiling is the quickest and least painful way for crickets to go. But how do you get a mass of crickets into the pot? Some farmers use dry ice, but others say that insects have a high tolerance for low oxygen. Or freezing. But some insects survive freezing. Flash freezing maybe? Many — though not all — of the insect producers that I spoke with cared about their animals and did not want to inflict pain and suffering on them. Given the uncertainty of scientific knowledge about insect pain and suffering, they would hedge their bets and use a combination of dry ice (which probably kills the insects, and at the very least knocks them out) followed by cooking or roasting (which ensures they will be killed).
In the context of killing animals humanely, some non-vegans argue that hunting deer is less ethically problematic than slaughtering cattle; hunted deer die suddenly, in the midst of life. They have one really bad day in an otherwise good life. Would we not all wish to die that way? For the entomophagists, this argument would favor foraging over farming. If you catch insects efficiently and dispatch them quickly in their home habitat, then, so the argument goes, they “die happy.”
However, the nature of the question changes if consumer demands for such “ethically captured” insects rise, and millions of people go tramping into forests and meadows and swamps to meet those demands. Insect-foraging in an overcrowded, bug-eating world may then result in the death and destruction of millions of other individuals and species as their habitats are destroyed and/or inedible or “undesirable” insects are caught in the nets. In fishing, this is euphemistically called “by-catch,” and in war, “collateral damage.” We might feel better about ourselves, but in the process of resolving a local, personal problem, we will have left a much larger negative ethical footprint.
We cringe when we see a cow or a dog or a horse suffering. This strongly suggests that something is ethically problematic. When the dog is shot in the movie Old Yeller or, more recently, the New Zealand adventure film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, we are upset, even if we understand at one level that this killing is stopping the animal’s suffering and is therefore the “right” thing to do. It is a quandary many veterinarians have faced when putting injured animals out of their misery. They cringe and yet go ahead with the killing because they are intent on minimizing pain and suffering.
For most people, the cringe factor doesn’t seem to arise when we think about killing insects, especially if the killing is done quickly and out of sight. We lack the imagination to empathize with insects. They are so very much other. How can I imagine what it is like to be a cricket if I cannot even imagine what it is like to be another person? The cringe factor arises when they arrive on the plate. However, in the entomophagy literature, this cringing at the insect in the salad has been interpreted not as an ethical issue, but as one of European cultural bias, to be overcome with better advertising.
But is it something deeper? A disturbing instinct that suggests something is wrong? A recognition of the unsettling dilemmas posed by having been born into a world that seems to demand a life for a life? It is, I suggest, always worth asking the questions.
Another criterion for ethical consideration, beyond suffering and cringing, has to do with how we value insects’ lives. Much of what is implicit in how entomophagists value insects has to do with the ecological services that bugs provide, their usefulness as food, and the disease-transmission threats they represent. But we value many things in life — friends, family, art, music — without any reference to such quantifiable outcomes. In many cases, we value animals that are rare, or in some sense beautiful — the so-called charismatic megafauna like lions and pandas. Insofar as insects are beautiful, they evoke ethical sensibilities in us. But what constitutes beauty in insects?
In some cases, people see beauty because of religious or spiri
tual connections. Albrecht Dürer included the stag beetle in his 1504 Adoration of the Magi because of its association with Christ. In other cases, economic value, play value, and beauty are entangled. In Japan, over a million stag beetles from 700 species are imported annually as pets and display animals. Some have fetched prices as high as US$5,000. In 2004, the twentieth Japan Rhinoceros Beetle Sumo Championships attracted over 300 contestants. In 2001, the number of rhinoceros and stag beetles alone imported into Japan was recorded at 680,000, from twenty-five countries. Some entomologists have even argued that the best place to look for biodiversity of stag beetles is in Japanese pet shops.
In other cases, there is a kind of aesthetic sense of beauty with no commercial or religious overtones. Galleries online include “The Unexpected Beauty of Bugs,”102 for instance, and “Beautiful Bugs of Belize.”103 Even some scientists express a kind of awe at the beauty of their subjects. Hölldobler and Wilson’s 2009 book The Superorganism is subtitled “The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies.” Bees are particularly prone to being thought of as beautiful for reasons unrelated to religion. In many parts of the world, people eat the adults and brood of bees and their relatives. In Europe and North America, entomophagists have pretty much avoided asking people to eat bees; it would be like promoting beef in New Delhi or putting dogs and cats on the plate in Toronto. We like bees. They are bodhisattvas, democrats, and essential pollinators. The Insect Cookbook, published in the Netherlands, lists bees as one of the insects that could be eaten, but in the actual recipes, they only appear as marzipan decorations.
So, as for ethical considerations in dealing with insects, whether foraged or farmed, we have their possible capacity for suffering. We have wildly different notions of beauty and value. We have the complicated idea of care. And, once we raise our ethical gaze from the grasshopper in our palm to populations, species, and the dynamic webs of multispecies communities and landscapes, we have what we might call “contracts” or “pacts.”
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 23