Humane Pesticides Are Massively Morally Urgent

If we're going to poison quadrillions of beings to death each year, we should at least try not to make it excruciatingly painful

I have lots of radical views about insects. I think probably most expected happiness and misery in the world is experienced by insects, and that our actions often have much more significant moral impacts on bugs than on people. But in this article, I’m not going to defend anything radical. My thesis here is very moderate: I think we should try to make pesticides kill insects less painfully.

Every year, quadrillions of insects are killed or harmed with pesticides—3.5 quadrillion, according to one estimate. This is about 30,000 times more than the number of people who have ever lived in human history. In the best cases, deaths take minutes or hours as the insects are slowly poisoned to death. In other worse cases, death takes days as the insects are left unable to shed their own skin and essentially crushed to death from the inside. In still other cases, insects starve to death as their guts malfunction. This is likely to be very painful.

It is plausible that many insects can suffer. When benchmarks are created to assess pain in animals, insects consistently meet most of the criteria, having nociceptors, responding to painkillers, demonstrating associative learning, and sometimes displaying surprising cognitive complexity. Of the criteria they don’t clearly meet, this is because of lack of research, not contrary evidence.

When flies are genetically engineered to have capsaicin receptors (responsible for tasting spicy food) they display strong negative behavioral reactions to food laced with capsaicin. They take small nibbles at the food, before violently quaking as if in distress. They find it so aversive that they even starve themselves to death rather than eat it. However, this stops if you give them painkillers. This isn’t definitive proof of consciousness, but it’s at least suggestive!

Many different insects learn to avoid stimuli that they associate with pain. When flies are given electric shocks paired with some odor, they learn to avoid the odor. The same is true of bees, ants, and various others. Insects behave, when exposed to heat, exactly as one would expect of an animal in pain. While it is possible that they feel only minimal suffering, on account of their cognitive simplicity, it is also possible that they feel a lot of pain.¹

The best report on animal sentience estimated insects that experienced pain within an order of magnitude or two as intensely as people. It at least doesn’t seem obvious to me that when insects are writhing around in agony, behaving like you or I would if we were in intense pain, they’re experiencing something on the level of a stubbed toe. I’m at least not convinced that it’s overwhelmingly likely that they’re vastly less conscious, in some qualitative sense, so that they see colors, hear sounds, and feel pain with overwhelmingly less vividness—as if the brightness and volume on their inner life has been turned down almost to zero. If a being might suffer a lot, then their being painfully killed by the quadrillions is a big deal.

If we conservatively estimate that insects feel pain on average 1/1,000th as intensely as people do, then pesticides annually cause about as much misery as 3 trillion painful human deaths. That is an amount of pain equivalent to if every human on the planet experienced intense pain, on the level of being poisoned to death, every single day. My guess is that this is more pain than is caused by the entire invertebrate farming industry (including even those ghastly shrimp farms).

That is very bad. It isn’t very clear whether pesticides on net increase or decrease insect suffering, because pesticides might lower insect populations. So it’s not clear if the world would be better if pesticides were phased out. But in any case, they are the cause of a very large amount of direct pain. We should aim to make them less painful.

I boldly propose: if we’re killing lots of beings that might be conscious, we should try to do it less painfully. If we’re causing intense pain to a population, every single year, that is 30,000 times more than the number of people who have ever lived, so that even by conservative estimates more expected pain is caused by this every year than by all human suffering in history, we should try to cause less intense pain. Radical, I know!

This isn’t some weird utilitarian view. It just seems like common sense—that we should try to hurt others less, if possible. We shouldn’t boil lobsters alive. If we can avoid it, we shouldn’t slowly poison insects to death in the maximally painful way. Insects are smaller than lobsters, but they’re fairly cognitively similar.

I think we’re biased against insects because they’re small. There used to be giant prehistoric insects that looked like this:

Imagine meeting this guy in a dark alley.

If you poisoned those giant insects to death, and then a trillion more, and a trillion more, and did that a thousand times, so that in total you poisoned to death 1 quadrillion of them, that would seem like a big deal. Our intuitions count insects far less than bigger animals. But this is an error. It treats size as morally relevant when it obviously isn’t.

So humane pesticides seem ridiculously important.

But despite this, and despite Brian Tomasik having been banging the drum about this a decade ago, nobody has funded it. There’s just been no research into how to make pesticides more humane. I want to emphasize: if you got humane pesticides implemented widely, you would affect quadrillions of animals every year! You might affect a distribution of pain, in a few years, more than all human misery in history.

So someone should get on this! Once we have humane pesticides, efforts can be carried out to increase their uptake. If you’re interested in funding humane pesticides, or interested in being funded to work on humane pesticides, feel free to shoot me a Substack DM or send me an email at untrappedzoid@gmail.com or contact Abraham Rowe. By sponsoring this, you’d be able to affect staggering amounts of suffering. If you work on or sponsor humane pesticides, you could maybe do more for insects than any person ever. And while the insects are unlikely to thank you (because they don’t talk) you can prevent quadrillions of them from experiencing immense agony. A thousand trillions worth of insects won’t have to die slowly, in horrible agony, alone, for days, in the dark.

1. There are some reasons to think simple animals might suffer a lot—both because they need more pain to learn and when they suffer, pain wholly envelops their mind, without other sophisticated cognitive processes going on.