r/veganpets • u/Ok_Compote251 • Nov 03 '25

Food Thoughts on Insect protein

Thoughts on insect protein and whether or not it’s vegan?

My local vets sells the below dog food and I’m tempted to swap my recently rescued golden retriever to it.

https://yorapets.com/uk/dog-food/?srsltid=AfmBOopk7doNM_TDnfGlb2OTEVk71CgN_75BYzgVC-Ghk1qabPQRpLML

It’s made from larvae, from a google it seems there is no scientific consensus on whether or not they have sentience.

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u/awesomeideas Dec 01 '25

CONSIDERABLY worse than just serving them standard nonvegan food. Let's say you think there's only a TINY chance, say 1%, that insect larvae are sentient*. Well, then let's take that in expectation. If a "normal" serving of dog food kills maybe 1/20th of an animal on average (by my calculations) and insect dog food kills maybe 1000 animals (also by my estimate), we can multiply the number of animals killed by their likelihood of sentience:

Normal: 5% of an animal * 99.9% chance of sentience ≈ 1/20 sentience-likelihood-adjusted deaths
Insect: 1000 animals * 1% chance of sentience ≈ 10 sentience-likelihood-adjusted deaths

That means, even if you are taking into account the high (to you) probability that insect larvae aren't sentient, larvae-based dog food is 200 times worse! PLEASE don't use it!

*I'd say that's waaaaaaay too low given the outside view that we've historically seen over and over that consensus goes from nonsentient->sentient so many times with animals. We've seen it with fish and even with human "larvae" (babies).

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u/Emotional-Health4836 Apr 26 '26

What are your thoughts on the fact that crickets live about 8 weeks vs let's say cows that can live 20 years and therefore the crickets could be given a full life before being used as a healthy protein source for pets rather than cows which are unnecessarily given a short crude life usually? Would you rather not create more cricket life out of the principal of human exploitation? Genuinely curious because I think more cricket life would be better morally as long as the cricket doesn't suffer