Insect Sentience with Bob Fischer

Mariann Sullivan: Oh, that's exactly the sweet spot that you fit into.

Bob Fischer: That's all I'm aiming for, really. I'm just trying to be above that threshold, and I'm going to consider this a success.

Mariann Sullivan: And you made it. Congratulations. And

Bob Fischer: But you know, Jasmin didn't show up. So I can see that actually I've only cleared the threshold with one of you, and that's just going to have to be enough.

Mariann Sullivan: She feels very bad about it.

Bob Fischer: No, no, no.

Mariann Sullivan: We're actually going to talk to you today about what is your new area of expertise. Last time we talked mostly about your academic career as a philosopher and focus on animal rights and your book on that topic. But now we're going to talk about the question that is driving everybody nuts and that's about insects and you're the man. You're the man who knows all about insects, what we're doing to them, and perhaps why we should change at least some of it.

But to start out with the easier question, let's just talk a little bit about exactly what we are doing to them. Because, assuming we care about them, we have to start by knowing what it is that we care about and it's not just the fact that obviously we kill a lot of insects in growing food and all of that and just in swatting mosquitoes and doing whatever it is that we do.

There's other stuff going on as well, right?

Bob Fischer: Right. Yeah, exactly. And so, just to be clear, you know, I am someone who is very surprised that I am spending a lot of time thinking about insects. This was not the plan. Did not, you know, start out looking for this kind of work. I came to it somewhat by accident and I was not thinking that this would be the kind of thing in which I would invest time because I like to do stuff where I'm more confident that it is the right thing to be doing.

And I’m, you know, I think, not totally confident here. I think there's lots of reason for uncertainty. But, it's a whole lot of individuals, and we are treating them pretty badly. And that's enough to get me thinking pretty hard about it. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't want to come off as someone who's here to tell the listeners, Oh man, let's do the hard pivot. It's time to be all insects all the time. That's not the story here. but it just being willing to take this seriously because of the combination of the changing science, the scale. And the severity of what's happening.

Mariann Sullivan: You know, I think everybody who's involved in animal rights is used to finding out things that we just never knew before. And now we have to be very concerned about that, so I think we've got open minds listening to this.

Bob Fischer: Of course, of course.

Mariann Sullivan: Dismayed minds, but let's face it, if you do animal rights, you're used to dismay as well.

Bob Fischer: I mean, a certain amount of, you know, abject horror, I think, just comes with the business. And we all just have to acclimate to being sad all the time. You know, as long as you can do that, then you’re fine.

Anyway, okay, so just to give the very, you know, high-level overview- Insects have been, and now are, farmed for just a wide variety of reasons.

So, you know, you think about everything from silk production, which is perhaps the most familiar case, to dye production. They're used in production of medical wound care technologies, and then the thing that's gotten a lot of attention just in the last 5 or 10 years has been the rise of insects as food and feed. So if you started talking to, you know, the folks in this industry a decade ago, they were excited about the idea that, well, look, maybe this is going to be the new alternative protein that everyone's going to get excited about.

You know, it's not going to be black bean burgers, it's going to be cricket burgers. And, if you were shopping at Whole Foods or other kind of, you know, crunchier stores, then you did see cricket chips for a couple of years and there were cricket protein bars and things like that. And there was sort of a brief moment when it looked like that might take off in Western countries. For the most part, it didn't.

Mariann Sullivan: I bet nobody bought them.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, basically, they just weren't that popular. It turns out that most Westerners don't really want to eat bugs, but the industry didn't go away. It evolved.

Mariann Sullivan: Can I interrupt you with one question that just occurred to me? Was there pushback from the meat industry about this, the way there is for, you know, our current alternative proteins? Did they make an effort to kill it?

Bob Fischer: That's a great question. Not to my knowledge. I am not aware of any such efforts.

Mariann Sullivan: Okay.

Bob Fischer: And I don't know why, though, I mean, of course, we could do some hypothesizing. In any case, the trend became thinking about insects as a protein supplement in animal feed. So, in particular, for aquaculture, you know, for fish, for chickens, for shrimp. Shrimp really like eating insect protein, and the hope was to sort of break into those markets because there are well-known reasons to be concerned about the way animal protein is used in those industries already, right?

I mean, we're all familiar with concerns about fish meal and emptying the oceans and the harms to the individual fish, et cetera. But if you're looking to replace fish meal, then these industries all become very attractive. And of course, you know, soy is the other thing. People have lots of environmental concerns about, you know, large scale soy production, clear cutting forests, et cetera, et cetera, just to feed other animals. And so the thought is, well, maybe insects could be. a replacement there too. And the, big selling point of the industry, the big pitch is insects can be fed on waste.

Mariann Sullivan: And probably in fairly small amounts of space.

Bob Fischer: And in fairly small amounts of space,

Mariann Sullivan: You don't need actual land. You just need a place.

Bob Fischer: That's right. You need a warehouse. In fact, not even a huge warehouse. there are a whole bunch of these that are run in shipping containers, like, farms that are run in shipping containers. So that was the big vision, you know, like, let's push towards this. In fact, those economic dreams have been pretty difficult to realize. It's quite hard to get price competitive with those other protein sources, and so right now, for the most part, in Western contexts, which, you know, basically mean Canada, US, Europe, UK. The two main things that are being done is pet food. So people are trying to use this as a protein supplement in pet food. So you can find cat foods and dog foods that are supplemented with black soldier fly larvae.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah,

Bob Fischer: And the other thing is pushing the waste management. So, you know, hey, you need this post-consumer waste or whatever you've got to be converted into some organic fertilizer. Well, we can use insects to do that, and their frass, you know, which is insect poop, becomes then the fertilizer that can be spread.

Mariann Sullivan: So they're not actually ground up themselves to be used as fertilizer? They're just like farmed for their poop.

Bob Fischer: Exactly.

Mariann Sullivan: Wow, this like gets weirder and weirder as we go.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, it's strange. I realize your regrets at doing the interview have just skyrocketed. You're like, how, how did I get here?

Mariann Sullivan: I'm already feeling mildly ill. I'm actually going to go all the way back to the beginning because you said silk, but that's worms. Are we including worms? Are worms insects?

Bob Fischer: Well, so…

Mariann Sullivan: Or are they within this group?

Bob Fischer: This is silk moth, right, which…

Mariann Sullivan: Right, right. Oh, right. So silkworms aren't actually worms. They're caterpillars, is that right?

Bob Fischer: Yeah, they are the larval stageof that moth. And I mean, actually, this is really important because a lot of these animals are reared and slaughtered at the larval stage. And, I think there's good reason to take adult insect sentience reasonably seriously, but you should be less confident at the larval stage, and so that complicates the picture quite a bit.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, though you can't get the larval without…

Bob Fischer: That's correct. You're definitely using a bunch of adults to get the larvae.

Mariann Sullivan: Right. It's sort of like dairy cows.

Bob Fischer: Right. Exactly.

Mariann Sullivan: So that leads us to the big question of sentience. It's like, why should we care about insects? And, you know, I'm talking to people who probably, like me, have all their lives, taking the spider out to the garden instead of smushing him.

But I never really thought I knew what was going on there, just, you know, erring on the side of caution, perhaps, but not at all resistant to the idea that there's stuff going on there.

Bob Fischer: Something going on. Yeah. Sure.

Mariann Sullivan: So what is going on?

Bob Fischer: Well, so there's a bunch to say here. I think one way of framing the conversation, though, is to think about what really is your evidence that a mouse is sentient, or a gecko is sentient, or a toad, or a turtle?

Mariann Sullivan: Or you.

Bob Fischer: Well, I mean, you know, at least with me I can talk to you. I can say…

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, but you can lie.

Bob Fischer: Well, and of course, I do all the time about my sentience. You know, I'm regularly deceiving…

Mariann Sullivan: No! That didn't hurt at all.

Bob Fischer: Right, that's right, that's right. But, you know, when you think about lots of animals, like we don't actually have really amazing evidence that less controversial animals are sentient, and yet we sort of, you know, we just take that without thinking a great deal about it.

So,

Mariann Sullivan: But you're saying like we, we do have really pretty good evidence now that like pigs and chickens and cows are sentient.

Bob Fischer: So when we think about the mammals, it's relatively straightforward because so much overlap of the neurological mechanisms. But as soon as you start leaving the mammals, things get more complicated. And when you think about vertebrates, where we just almost automatically give them the benefit of the doubt.

Again, you know, think about the turtles and the geckos and so on and so forth. Actually, the evidence there isn't really that different from what we have in the case of a lot of insects. And so I think the first thing to do is just like changing the baseline for the conversation.

Mariann Sullivan: Just to clarify, even though this is exactly what you said, but I just want to reiterate it. You're not saying that the evidence indicates that they're not sentient. You're just saying it's really hard to actually know for sure.

Bob Fischer: Well, yeah. So here's what I wanna say. What I wanna say is. Look, we all think we've got really great reasons, and I think this is true. I mean, I'm not saying this facetiously, we think we've got really good reasons to attribute sentience to a whole lot of animals with spines. And then we think there's some like, magical bright line in the biological world between the things with spines and the things without. And the point is just, hey, actually, the evidence doesn't change that much. It's not really that much worse in a lot of these invertebrates, or at least in some of them, and they're worth taking seriously for the same reason. So the point is really just like, let's start the conversation by changing our expectations a little bit and by thinking, okay, you know, I do basically give turtles a benefit of the doubt because they seem to really want to avoid some things and they can learn, like, where threats are, and then proceed to avoid them, and if you keep harming them, they can develop pain sensitization, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, all the same things apply to fruit flies, and so I think once you realize that actually our evidence is of the same type, suddenly going the next step and thinking about that with insects doesn't feel quite so crazy.

Mariann Sullivan: And, you know, it doesn't feel crazy to me.

I just prefer not to think about it a lot. And I just want to, I don't want to go down this road. I really don't want to go down this road, but it made me think of it. The similarities between insects and turtles is different than the evidence or the lack thereof about plants.

Cause we're not going into like we should assume everything's sentient.

Bob Fischer: Right.

Mariann Sullivan: There are still differences.

Bob Fischer: There's still difference. So, I mean, the way to think about it is, you know, starting in the nineties, there were people who started to come up with frameworks, and these are precautionary frameworks, like, how do we tell, how do we draw the line and decide when we ought to be taking some precautionary measures? And what they did was they looked at, okay, let's identify a mix of features that animals might have, right? That distinguish them from plants, and that seem to be important for their ability to feel pain. And these are things like, do they have nociceptors? Nociceptors are the special kinds of neurons that help us detect damage, you know, we’ve got them scattered throughout our body and animals have them scattered throughout their bodies, and insects have them. Does the animal engage in motivational trade offs?

In other words, are they balancing risks and rewards? And when the opportunity gets a little bit better, are they willing to sort of take a bigger hit, you know, pay a larger cost to get a benefit, right? Do they respond to analgesics? In other words, like, can you give them something to knock out the pain and they behave really differently? And, you know, this has been demonstrated in insects a whole bunch. and there's some really fascinating studies.

One of the wilder ones came out just, well, 2023. I was gonna say last year. but, what they did was, so insects by nature do not have a sensitivity to capsaicin, the stuff that's in jalapenos that makes them hot.

But through the wonders of gene editing, this team in South Korea inserted the same thing in humans that creates that sensitivity into these fruit flies. And then, they looked to see what happened when you gave the fruit flies capsaicin-laden food. And immediately, they totally freak out. They spend all this time trying to groom their mouth parts, and they ultimately starve to death rather than eat that food.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh, god.

Bob Fischer: Yeah. No, it's horrifying. But the striking thing was, then once you gave them the exact same drugs that alleviate pain in humans, then they were willing to eat the food again and not starve.

Mariann Sullivan: That's strong evidence. Both of the experience of pain in insects and of the psychopathy of scientists.

Bob Fischer: Well, that's fair.

Mariann Sullivan: um,

Bob Fischer: Yeah,

I mean, a lot of insects, because of course, just as a quick, quick point on that, because insects, you know, no invertebrate in any jurisdiction, as far as I know, has general legal protections in research. So as a result, they're very popular model organism, because you can more easily do things to them that…

Mariann Sullivan: You can do anything, yeah.

Bob Fischer: that you couldn't do to, say, a mouse.

Mariann Sullivan: All right, we're talking about sentience, but like, that's not a word that…

Bob Fischer: We should back up a little bit. Yeah, that's right. That’s right.

Mariann Sullivan: It means a lot of things to a lot of people and,

Bob Fischer: So, here’s what I mean when I’m talking about that, right? So I think about sentience as having two parts, right? So there's being aware of stuff, being conscious, and then there's a particular kind of consciousness that's of interest, which is to feel things that are positive and negative. Right, so you might be able to be conscious of stuff like, I'm thinking about, the location of my keys right now. Well, that's not a positive or negative thing. It's just an experience, you know, it's a conscious thing that I can do. I can entertain a thought, but it doesn't have a valence.

It's not positive or negative. Whereas with sentience, now we're adding positive and negative dimensions. So fear is a negatively valenced state, right? Stress, negatively valenced state. And so when we're talking about sentience, that's what we're talking about. Now, some people just care about consciousness all on its own.

They don't care if it's valenced. but, you know, if you think back to the sort of classic Benthamite idea, right? That's not whether they can talk or reason, but whether they can suffer. That's putting the emphasis on sentience and saying there's something morally special about that. So when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about the idea that, yep, they really are aware of it.

You know, they really are conscious of it and it's got this valence quality. And so when we're thinking about pain, that's a characteristic of, or a standard classic example of a capacity that a sentient being would have.

Mariann Sullivan: And what about the other side? When you say positive, do you just mean the absence of negative or actual pleasure?

Bob Fischer: Yeah, actual pleasure, positive states, enjoying, youknow, the sucrose-laden food, like a bee might. So, yeah, they can have positive states too. And it seems like, you know, some of these animals do have those kinds of states. You know, there's a very famous in these very idiosyncratic circles, but you know, these now famous videos that Lars Chitka's lab was responsible for, of bees playing with marbles. And sure, it seems like they're just doing it for fun. Um, you know, they just enjoy rolling these things around.

Mariann Sullivan: Bees seem particularly, they're kind of standouts, aren't they?

Bob Fischer: There are standouts. I mean, first of all, there are a whole lot of different kinds of bees.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh right, yeah, and speaking of a whole lot of different kinds, we're talking about a really, really large number of creatures here.

Bob Fischer: We're talking about at least a million known species, an estimated 5. 5 million, you know, extent right now, alive right now. And we're talking about just absolutely wild numbers of individuals, both in the wild and in captivity. Right, so in the wild, one estimate that's been thrown around is ten quintillion, which is a number that no one can process, right? But even in the farm context, we're talking about in the many trillions.

So, you know, there's one facility in France right now that claims to be able to process three trillion individuals a year. So, compared to vertebrate farming. That's larger than all vertebrate farming combined.

Mariann Sullivan: Right, it's larger than anything, yeah. Getting back to sentience a little bit before I get off of the definition. I don't know where I came across it, but in trying to put these questions together to figure out what it was that we should talk about. I also saw references to emotions. Like, what does that mean?

Like, is that just the experience of pleasure and the experience of pain, or are there people who are at least making the supposition that insect sensations goes beyond that into, like, actual emotional lives?

Bob Fischer: For sure. So, I mean, one, it's, of course, really tricky to think about how you should go about attributing emotion states. Like, what's going to count as good evidence?

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, but you know, also, I keep interrupting you, I'm sorry.

Bob Fischer: No, go ahead, finish your thought.

Mariann Sullivan: But, you know, there's like the burden of proof, too. I mean, like, do we have to prove that they have emotions in order for us to believe they have emotions? Or do we start off assuming they have emotions, and waiting for someone to disprove it?

Bob Fischer: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's important. It's an important clarification. So, I mean, there are a bunch of different things. If you're just looking at, like, well, we just want to use simple behavioral evidence, you know, you can interpret lots of behavior of insects as fear, and that's an emotion, right? You can also think about the fact that fruit flies, again, they aren't just useful as pain models, where they're used to study human pain. The reason that lab was swapping out genes in fruit flies was because they're trying to use them as a screening tool for new analgesics. but they're also depression models.

So, you know, you're probably familiar with the forced swim test right, in mice, and well, we don't need to talk about it, there's nothing uplifting about the forced swim test, but if you're not familiar with it, you can Google it if you’re interested.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I imagine that most people know about it.

Bob Fischer: Most of the people would know about it.

Mariann Sullivan: And if you’re not familiar with it, you can imagine what it means.

Bob Fischer: Right, the same thing is done with fruit flies, and so, you know, insofar as we think that is a good way of showing that mice can experience depression, then it becomes a piece of evidence that, well, maybe even fruit flies can experience that. Which, you know, is a disorienting thought. I mean, you know, I sometimes have vertigo where I'm like, you’re looking at this thing, it's so small, and you think, could it possibly be the case that this much is going on in a package that tiny? But. you have to just look at what the behavioral evidence is, you have to look at what the neurological capacities are, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so wild.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, it really does, even from being an animal rights activist, it changes your view of the world to being something, a combination of so miraculous, so extraordinarily miraculous and so unbelievably horrifying.

Bob Fischer: Yeah. I mean, one…

Mariann Sullivan: Which, you know, kind of defines life on Earth.

Bob Fischer: That's right, I mean, there are a couple things that can help, just in terms of sifting our intuitions a bit. You know, one of them is just to remember that, first of all, a lot of insects used to be a lot bigger in earlier eras, that insects have gotten smaller.

And so if you're just sort of anchoring on the size, recognize that animal sizes change over evolutionary time, you know, they were dragonflies with 2-foot wingspans, at one point. So, you know, that's a factor to remember. Another thing to remember is that the number of neurons you've got is really affected by how big your body is.

So, you know, a blue whale has a much much larger brain than a human. And why is that? Well, it's just got a lot more body mass to coordinate, right? And so it needs more neurons just to map from those to all the parts of the body. You got a small body, you don't need as many neurons, right? And it's also worth knowing that, you know, some insects are surprisingly large and some vertebrates are surprisingly small. There's a gecko with the same number of neurons as a wasp, right? Like, there are really small geckos and really large wasps. And so you start to realize, like, okay, if I'm just comparing, basically, like, you know, the ants in my kitchen to the deer outside, of course, it feels insane, but when you start recognizing the diversity of insects suddenly, it doesn't seem quite as wild.

Mariann Sullivan: I don't know if this is true of all insects, but on the counter-evidence, isn't it true that insects don't really respond to injuries, even really unbelievably grievous injuries in ways that we would recognize as indicating that they are in pain?

Bob Fischer: Great question. Great question. So, there are several things to say here, and we don't have to dwell on this at great length. But, the first thing is, the studies that have made that point, you know, sometimes people will focus on praying mantises, and oh, you know, the praying mantis famously gets eaten while mating and, you know, just goes on gladly and there's like a million Far Side comic strips with this premise, right?

I mean, that's, that's sort of the idea.

Mariann Sullivan: I've known a few men like that too, as well.

Bob Fischer: Well, I mean, that's a separate podcast. Uh, one worth doing. I mean, but a separate podcast. But, you know, the thing is that actually, you know, when you look, first of all, at the behaviors of praying mantises, a lot of them try really hard not to get eaten.

So the first thing to recognize is that these anecdotes that people will use are not necessarily representative. We don't actually find this uniformly. We just find, yes, there are some cases where this has been reported, but there are also a lot of other cases to consider.

So that's the first thing to say.

Mariann Sullivan: I see. So, it's not that we're avoiding the conclusion. It's that the evidence isn't necessarily there to even draw that conclusion.

Bob Fischer: So that's the first thing. The other thing to say is, it does look like in some of the mechanical, so there, you just distinguish between different kinds of damage. So there's mechanical damage to an organism, like, you know, a puncture wound, to the exoskeleton, there's chemical damage, you know, there's thermal damage, right?

There are different ways that an insect can be harmed. Electrical damage, right? And though there is more variation on the mechanical side, there's a lot less variation in terms of these other things. So if you look at how insects respond to heat, they get really concerned about heat, and they respond in a way that's much more intuitive, the way you'd expect a mammal, say, to respond. And so that should make us think, oh, maybe we're focusing a bit too much on mechanical damage and not thinking about these other ways that insects can be harmed. So, they do actually respond to injury, just not always the same kinds of injuries that we might anticipate.

Mariann Sullivan: You know, for as long as I've been teaching about animals and talking about them, sentience, I've always talked about sentience kind of as an on-off switch.

You know, and it's the bad guys who would say things like, Dogs don't feel pain the way we do, and therefore it's okay what we're doing to them.

Is that wrong? Is sentience a scale?

Bob Fischer: Well, I think framing it as a scale is a good first step toward the more complicated view that I think we should have. So again, imagine if you have the two-part view that I had, where you think there's consciousness, and then there's this suite of different capacities that an animal could have. Maybe you think consciousness is on or off, like either the lights are on in the organism or not. Right? Maybe that's the way you think about consciousness. Even if you do think that way about consciousness, which seems reasonable, but, you know, even if you do think that way, you might think that all those other capacities are dissociable. So maybe it turns out that, like, really simple animals are gonna have, you know, a basic kind of pain and pleasure system, and not that much else. But it could also be the case that, you know, and then you add on different capacities depending on the fitness requirements of the organism, like, well, what's actually in that animal's interest to have? And then you can have other dimensions of variation. So you might get more unity over time. So maybe some animals have a better sense of themselves as sort of persisting through time, better memory, linking their pasts and their futures, allowing them to develop more of a sense of self. So, once you start thinking about sentience as a thing that could have various dimensions and that those dimensions can come apart, then you can start to think, well, yeah, there probably are some interesting differences between, say, a black soldier fly larva and your dog. It's still true that in some sense there's something that's on or off, you know, like, either they can feel something as pain or they can't, but we can think, well, you know, there are differences and those affect the way it makes sense to treat them. You know, like if your dog can remember all sorts of things, it can develop reasonable expectations about what's going to happen, then, you know, you should take your dog for the walk when the dog thinks he's going to be taken for a walk, right? I mean, like, that seems like an important aspect of treating that dog respectfully is to understand that he can form those kinds of expectations, and then those need to be respected. If an animal can't form those kinds of expectations, okay, well, then that's not part of its respectful treatment, right?

So we can just use these capacities to help us think a bit better about what it means to treat these animals well.

Mariann Sullivan: Even though ultimately we're just making our best guess?

Bob Fischer: Yeah, we're making our best guess.

Mariann Sullivan: Largely. There’s not a lot of, there's not a lot of proof of anything here.

Bob Fischer: There's not a lot of proof, but, you know, that was never the standard, you know, what we're always trying to do…

Mariann Sullivan: No. I’m not suggesting it should be.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, what we're always trying to do is just do our best and not just, well, our best guess, but also our best guess about what we should believe. But also our best guess about what we should do, even given massive uncertainty about what we should believe.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that would be good if people would adopt that one.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, right. I mean, we all, we're all in that court.

Mariann Sullivan: Just to clarify, you mentioned before that there are unbelievably large number of insects species in the world. And so it's kind of like talking about animals. I mean, if we are talking about variations in levels of sentience, it's not like insects as opposed to mammals, it could be different kinds of insects and like mosquitoes are not the same as praying mantises, and they might not be having the same experiences.

Bob Fischer: Exactly. I mean, I think, you know, to some degree, I think we all believe this to begin with, you know, people who take really animals seriously. We think like, oh yeah, they've got their own umwelt, they've got their own, you know, way of understanding the world that's part of the, like, the glory and the mystery of nature is that these are such radically different ways of engaging with the world, informed by different senses, informed by different capacities, informed by different, you know, little, evolutionary niches, etc.

So, I think, yeah, there's no surprise there that we could see that variation in these animals as well. It's just a massively diverse group.

Mariann Sullivan: All right. So getting to the point here,

Bob Fischer: Yeah, right.

Mariann Sullivan: Assuming we care, you know, and if they’re sentient, I imagine most people listening care or think they should care, what do we do about it? And what are insect advocates doing about it? And well, I have like 12 more follow up questions, but let's start there.

Bob Fischer: Right. Sure. I mean, I think the first thing to say is when we start trying to think about what to do and how to proceed and so on and so forth, there’s always different scales, right? What should you do as an individual? You know, what kind of attitude should you have toward the insects around you? What kind of difference can you make? What should we hope for in terms of, you know, the reform of an industry or, you know, what best practice would involve and so on and so forth. And between that, of course, there are a million different levels that you might be interested in and want to think about. And so we got to, you know, decide what we want to focus on. In this conversation, it's sort of what's most interesting and what feels most relevant, but suppose you're really interested in these industries and you want to think about, you know, the insects as food and feed industry. You want to understand what's going on there. The first thing to say is you know, we're going to have to ask foundational questions about the way we approach trying to advocate for animal welfare and advocate for animals generally, right?

So, I come from an orientation where my way of thinking about this is, Look, animals are going to be used. This is just a central part of the contemporary world, and animal-focused economies are just, just incredibly powerful. And so what we should be doing is working toward feasible reforms that allow us to give animals the best lives we can in the systems that they're in. And so my orientation toward the insect space is the same, and I think, okay, well, you know, when I'm looking at insect farming, you know, where do I think it's most possible to make material progress for these animals? Probably around slaughter and depopulation. So, if a bunch of insects get sick, can the depopulation methods be ones that involve, you know, the most humane death possible? If we're going to slaughter these animals in enormous numbers, is there a path to doing that that results in pre-slaughter stunning, so they don't have to experience this if they can, in fact, have those experiences? So, that's my orientation toward the way of thinking about this. Lots of your listeners might not have that kind of orientation, might think, you know, all the questions are about how to end the use of animals. And those are really important questions, and I take those questions very seriously, but, it's not my orientation, it's not the way I come to the issues.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, do you think it's, you know, even if you have a very vegan orientation and would like to eradicate animal use completely, I guess you could have that attitude towards the aspect of insect-killing that you are working on where they're being farmed. But I'm not sure it's possible even for the most avid vegan to take the position that we could evolve to a place where we wouldn't be killing any of them.

Bob Fischer: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: So it is a different thing to think about.

Bob Fischer: Yeah. I mean, and it's not just a different thing to think about, in terms of, so there's the question of, like, what's the end game? So, you know, I think for a lot of people who are thinking about chickens their answer is, like, the end game is empty cages, right?

Like, that's the end game. We just don't farm them anymore. know, you could have that way of thinking about. But of course, even if you did, we'd still be killing them in crop production. We'd still be doing, you know, all sorts of things to them.

Mariann Sullivan: And even if we minimized it, it's hard to imagine, maybe it's possible.

Bob Fischer: But it is very hard to imagine,

Mariann Sullivan: But it’s hard to even imagine a world where we're not killing insects.

I mean Jains, I guess the Jains have imagined it.

Bob Fischer: Well, it's hard to imagine a modern world.

You know, I think that you can imagine various kinds of worlds that we've all opted out of, you know, basically, we've all said we don't actually want to live in the world that might have the smallest harm footprints. We want to live in worlds with iPhones and international travel and…

Mariann Sullivan: I can live without iPhones, that's for sure.

Bob Fischer: Well, I mean, I didn't know you were an Android user… but that's fine. but I do think that that's relevant. You know, when we think about the sheer scale of the ways that insects are harmed, it does kind of make you a bit more harm minimization focused because it doesn't look like there's an end game that just doesn't involve any harm at all. So even if I weren't disposed to that view, generally, I think insects might nudge you toward it. At least when you think about the number and the complexity of the relationships between humans and insects.

Mariann Sullivan: I think that one of the things that I find frustrating about the insect question is that, obviously, we are not making a whole lot of traction, if any, on cows or pigs or chickens, animals that actually are clearly sentient, and whom people like and would never do a mean thing to, and we can't seem to do anything there.

So why expand our focus then I feel wrong when I say that because obviously if they're sentient, we should be thinking about them. But these, issues are kind of like competing in my head.

Like how can we like suddenly expand the movement in a way that most people are gonna think is completely nuts when we can't even accomplish the things that most people think actually make sense?

Bob Fischer: Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing that we should acknowledge here is really the point that I was making in the very beginning, like, I do think it would be crazy to suddenly say, well, look, they're just, you know, we're harming more insects than anything else. So, like, let's put all the resources behind the insects.

You know, I think that would be unrealistic. It is unrealistic, but it was also be like, very inadvisable, just given the extent of our uncertainty. It would be strategically unwise in terms of where we're most likely to be able to marshal public support. It has motivational issues going for it, and that I think we're just less able to get excited about fighting for welfare reforms for larva compared to very sympathetic pigs. We should just recognize all of that. Like, it would be a mistake. And so we're not in a situation of talking about a major pivot. I think the real question is, okay, is it a distraction? Is it somehow a mistake even to have the conversation? Should we sort of suppress the idea that insects might be worth taking seriously because we want to keep the focus on animals for whom we think we can make a larger difference? And I think that's the version of the strategic question that I find a bit more interesting and salient. And I guess my take is, I'm happy to come on this podcast and chat with you because you asked me to, but you know, I'm actually somewhat careful about the way I approach this and the venues in which I talk about it.

And I try mostly to put out stuff in academic context and try to be very mainstream and boring in the way that I raise this issue. And I'm not trying to, you know, advocate for huge resources being pushed in this direction. I think we should have enough that we can have a field of insect welfare science, learn about these animals, get a better understanding of both whether they're sentient and what we can do for them, if they are. We need to learn about the practicalities of what it would look like to do insect farming better. How exactly you would do pre-slaughter stunning if you were going to do it, etc, etc. It's a pretty modest academic ask compared to saying, like, you know, Free the Flies is the new tattoo that all vegans should get.

I mean, it's a very different proposal.

Mariann Sullivan: Jasmin actually has an insect tattoo. I'm not sure if it's a fly though.

Bob Fischer: Well, I support this entirely. But, yeah, so, I mean…

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, from what you've said, it is actually, and shockingly, I think, possible to get traction on this issue. And indeed, at certain points you have. I mean, people do not just laugh at you and think this is ridiculous. It is taken seriously. By some.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, that’s right, and I think, by some, and I think, you know, one thing to recall is just that most people have never really thought about this issue, and they don't know about it the way the science has changed really radically. They don't realize that, you know, fruit flies are being used as pain models and depression models.

They don't realize that there's all this study on, you know, motivational trade-offs in cockroaches. They don't realize that we know all these things about, you know, facial recognition in wasps and, you know, play in bees and all these other sorts of things. Termites having 20-year-long monogamous relationships, etc.

Like, you know, that's just not part of people's common understanding of the world. But turns out, you know, the world's weirder than we thought.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, what would be your advice to animal rights advocates who are listening to this, who don't know a lot about this issue and are probably going to be confronted by somebody who reads some article and says, “So I understand that, you know, now you want to free the flies, uh….”

Bob Fischer: Yeah, I had no idea I was creating that slogan, but you know, I mean, things have to come from someplace. I mean, I think the first thing to say about that is the same kinds of things we say to all kinds of other objections, you know, when someone says, Oh, so you really think we should, you know, be taking care of chickens when they're starving kids, or we should be worrying about this, you know, worrying about pigs when they're homeless people on the streets. The first response is always, well, you know, it's not an either or like, we can care about both. It's also not necessarily saying, oh, yeah, I think 100 percent of the state's budget should go toward addressing this issue in farming. We all agree. There are lots of things to care about in the world.

And it's really important to address a whole bunch of injustices that are taking place. So I think there…

Mariann Sullivan: I think also there's a difference between injustices that we're witnessing and ones that we're perpetrating.

Bob Fischer: Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So, one thing to say is that, you know, I think another thing to say, if someone ends up in that kind of conversation is just to, you know, point people toward some of the basic resources that are out there to learn a bit more about these animals, right? So, there are a zillion books these days that will just give you a glimpse into these animals’ lives in a way that, you know, most people haven't. You know, the work on bees in particular, there's a lot of great popular press stuff that can just sort of open your eyes to the sort of micro-worlds that we've been close to.

Mariann Sullivan: Some amazing videos about bees.

Bob Fischer: Exactly. Amazing videos. And then, if you want to sort of dig into the science, one of the most interesting people working on this is an entomologist named Megan Barrett, and she has a lab at Indiana University in Annapolis where she's just trying to answer the basic questions, and she's really interested in trying to make this stuff accessible and has written some sort of encyclopedia-style articles and handbook style articles that can give people a sense of what's going on. So those are places to start, and I can give you a link if you want to drop it in the show notes.

Mariann Sullivan: One more question because it occurred to me when we were talking about that. That there's also, I find there's a lot of people who would never like squish a spider or kill a fly. Well, flies are a little dicier, but who are not vegan and who don't really think about animals on factory farms.

Do you think that insects are almost like a way to talk about animals, the gateway animal? I mean, it seems so bizarre to me, but it is true.

Bob Fischer: That's right. I mean, this is a great question. I haven't given it a ton of thought. I'd be very curious to know what you think, whether you think there is kind of some leverage there. My initial reaction is that I have tried versions of this before and it has worked. You know, one thing I have said to in conversations about this is just, you know, just think about what you teach your kid. You know, how would you feel if you saw your kid putting ants under a magnifying glass, you know, or…

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah! Most people would find that troubling.

Bob Fischer: They'd be really troubled and you think, okay, well, you know, what is it in you that is concerned about the treatment of even these animals?

And I love, you know, the stuff that Matthew Scully wrote all those years ago about really attending to vulnerability and our responses to vulnerability as a test of our character.

And, you know, insects are the limit case. They're sort of maximally vulnerable to us. Anyone can kill them. Anyone can catch and kill them. That's one way I think people actually do recognize, oh yeah, there's something concerning about not paying any attention to this life.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, though sometimes it is so hard to. The world is just mysterious. And people are even more mysterious in the lines they draw.

Bob Fischer: The don't make more sense as you get further along, do they?

Mariann Sullivan: No. They sure don't. Well, this has been fascinating. I'm really, really glad you came back to talk about it.

Bob Fischer: Thanks for your interest.

Mariann Sullivan: I still I'm not, you know, I don't always know what to make of this issue, but I think that's just going to be an ongoing fact about my life.

Bob Fischer: And look, I think it's really important in all these conversations to separate the question of, like, what should you think from what should you do? You know, I'm often really uncertain. I often think like it's a coin flip. Maybe it's not even a coin flip. Maybe it's, you know, a very low probability thing. But still, sometimes, we should act when we're highly uncertain. You know, we should take some precautionary measures. We should be careful.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh yeah, I’m all for it.

Bob Fischer: And so that's my orientation toward this.

Mariann Sullivan: Well, thank you for sharing it with us today. It's been very enlightening.

Bob Fischer: Pleasure as always, Mariann.

Mariann Sullivan: Same here. And maybe we'll talk a little bit more in the bonus segment. And I'll ask you a little bit, maybe about not insects. We'll see.

Really, really a pleasure. Thanks, Bob.