Advocating for insects: why, what and how to campaign effectively
Ending our series on insect agriculture that marked the release of our latest video, Dr Alex Lockwood discusses insect advocacy. When we have so much trouble helping non-vegans to make the ethical connection with traditionally farmed animals, how can we hope to do it with crickets and caterpillars?
I’m not going to begin by telling you how many insects there are around us.
Insects - not only those belonging to the class Insecta of the Arthropoda phylum, but all those we tend to group under the term, including spiders, worms, and other ‘bugs’ - are multitudinous. There are over a million different species, from the loved (butterflies, bees) to the often hated (locust, cockroaches).
They make up two-thirds of all biodiversity on Earth. But I’m not going tell you quite how many. Because it is highly likely that their ubiquity and numbers are a large part of how humans have come to regard insects: as overwhelming, uncontrollable, and a threat. Think of your reactions and associations with the words ‘plague’, ‘swarm’, ‘colony’ (or how and where these are used by politicians in relation to migrants, refugees, or the ‘colonies’ of Africa).
But two things about insect numbers are clear. The first is this: our planet’s life system could not operate without insects, their role in the pollination of crops and soil health; and second, the number of wild living insects, like nearly all nonhuman life, is declining at an alarming rate as humans take over the world. Studies in Europe have found insect abundance or biomass has declined between 38 per cent and 75 per cent.
The number of insects under human exploitation is growing as some species, such as crickets, become an economic opportunity as “alternative protein”. Huge insect farms are lauded for relative environmental benefits and a perceived reduction in suffering due to insects’ assumed lack of or lesser sentience than other farmed animals such as pigs or chickens. This, despite us constantly learning more all the time about their ability to feel pain and avoid harm.
A little while ago, Peter Singer argued that the time is not right to “launch a campaign for insect rights.” For Singer, we humans do not know enough about insects to campaign credibly, and, anyway, he says, “the world is far from being ready to take such a campaign seriously.”
But a lot has changed in the last few years, not least the rapid rise in insect farming. We learn more each day of both the subjective experience of insects and stories of their calamitous destruction. And Singer is not the only voice we listen to - Jeffrey Lockwood (no relation) has long been campaigning for “our ethical obligations towards insects” and contemporary advocates such as the Natural History Museum’s “Fly Girl” Erica McAlister has been actively raising awareness. Now is exactly the right time to launch a campaign for insects. But what would such a campaign look like? And would it be taken seriously?
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A model for success: bees
The thing is, such campaigns are already taken seriously - often when limited to single issues, and the species is right. This week is actually #BeesNeedsWeek, an official UK Government campaign to encourage individuals to take five actions to care for bees (and other pollinators). The campaign is widely supported by the many groups involved in bee and pollinator conservation such as Bumblebee Conservation and the British Beekeepers Association.
There are many ways in which bees have become “beloved” as BBKA patron Jimmy Doherty calls them. These are some ingredients for campaigns that challenge the devastation and exploitation insects are currently experiencing. These are:
A reframing, e.g. from ‘bug’ to “beloved” (language really matters);
A concerted focus on their individuality both as single beings and a single species;
Sustained media attention to their decline;
Their role as a “flagship species” and personification of bees in terms of their role in human affairs (such as crop pollination);
Challenges to feelings of threat or disgust when we perceive insects as taking up space in what we believe are human environments (such as our homes, kitchens, food);
Images or stories that reinvent the human–insect encounter – a wonderful example is the TikTok sensation of Erica Thompson who is TexasBeeWorks; some of her videos have over 85 million views of interacting calmly and lovingly with bees;
Champions who can be trusted messengers, such as bee expert Dave Goulson.
When such a combination of factors come together they can have a tremendous positive impact on insect species. These campaigns transform human regard for insects and provide ways in which everyone can contribute to their flourishing. Alas, as the fate of the Monarch butterfly attests (a decline of 99 per cent over 40 years), wonderful campaigns and calls to action can also be powerless in the face of human capitalist expansion, pesticide and agriculture lobbying groups, and the climate emergency.
Caveat: what’s wrong with this model?
There are three important caveats to explore when looking at a model for how our attitudes towards bees have changed and how these can be used for broader campaigns, especially around insect farming. These are:
1. Animals are not ‘Natural Capital’ – as the UK Government makes clear in the second paragraph of its #BeesNeedsWeek material, the importance of bees is for them primarily economic: bees “contribute the equivalent of more than £500 million a year to UK agriculture and food production”. This ‘putting a price’ on insects merely foregrounds their subordination to human needs, rather than helping protect them and their habitats for their own sakes, and makes them more, not less, likely to be exploited through farming;
2. The focus on “charismatic species” has long been identified as problematic in conservation efforts, where huge amounts of effort and money are spent on projects to ‘save’ emblematic animals (the panda bear, for example) at the expense of often more critically endangered but less photo-friendly species; with huge variation and already powerful negative associations for some insects, choosing to ‘save’ some over others (such for example bees over wasps) would not help those less attractive species commonly involved in insect farming, such as mealworms or crickets;
3. These conservation models provide very little insight into running campaigns against the breeding, feeding and killing of insects (even though, for example, butterfly breeding and farming is big business for fashion and art—just ask Damian Hirst).
If we are going to take insect suffering seriously, we need to take insect farming seriously. And to do that, there are lessons to learn and practices to avoid in what we have already seen through mainly conservation efforts to protect insect life and habitat.
So how can we advocate for insects?
Like all advocacy work, we need to be both tactical and strategic in how we go about changing attitudes and behaviours towards insects.
Animal justice advocates should probably leave the campaigns for free-living insects to those in the conservation space who are already doing (and funded for) this work: Bug Life, Butterfly Conservation, and many more groups are doing this work and doing it well.
Instead, those who currently campaign to end farming and fishing for the liberation of all beings should not ignore the needs of insects and bring them into the circle of our compassion (as some religious groups already do). So here are three areas for consideration:
One. Change the Language.
A large part of any shift in our relation to insects is going to be through shifting the language we use to describe and refer to them. As others, such as Emma Franklin in the field of corpus linguistics have shown us, the way we talk about animals matters a great deal.
So thinking of bees as “beloved” or “buggers” matters in how we immediately respond to the bee caught in our window. Imagine if we thought of wasps as “wonderful” rather than “wicked” (dangerous, drunk, harmful, angry) and how different our impulse to respond might be. Right now, many insects are considered “pests,” “swarms,” “vermin”—especially when they transgress boundaries into “human” environments.
Of course, most people mostly retain moral regard for humans only, so the use of “dehumanizing language” that labels people as insects has been shown time and again to be used by politicians and others to legitimize violence against those groups because they are now ‘no more than vermin, pests, cockroaches’ etc. This only works because this lesser regard for insects, combined with the disgust we feel for “vermin,” “pests,” “cockroaches” already exists in our mental models for who we value and who we do not.
These language changes then demand that we do two things:
Always campaign with skilful and strategic language choices in our campaigning materials and messaging; perhaps using the materials from the Centre for Story-based Strategy to get started;
Run campaigns specifically focused on language change.
For campaigns against insect farming, and the arguments for effective campaigns, WATCH OUR VIDEO.
Two. Create and advocate for personal liberatory praxis.
Or, that is, “be the change you wish to see in the world” - then campaign for it.
In the same way that animal activists do not eat animals or use products made from animals, if we want to advocate for insects and their liberation from human exploitation, we cannot go around squashing ants or swatting flies from our houses.
The academic geographers Hannah Gunderman and Richard White have provided eight steps we can all take. I particularly like Step 6: “appreciate the company of insects and value your (all too fleeting) time together. Watch, observe and marvel at their wonder.”
All eight are important - and could form the basis of insect awareness and liberation campaigns among activists first, priming and preparing us to storm the insect farms. In very brief abbreviation, the eight steps are:
Recognize, minimize, and ultimately banish language that is derogatory towards insects (and humans and all other nonhuman animals);
Raise consciousness of others by challenging their anti-insect behaviour;
Take direct action by stopping others trying to kill or injure insects;
Adopt least-harm strategies to remove insects from your home, and identify a safe space you can move them to;
Embrace vegan organic food production, either growing your own or purchasing;
Watch, observe and wonder;
Support scholars and activists of colour who are engaging with decolonization praxis and education (as many indigenous cultures have far more mutual compassionate relationships with insects);
Engage in communities of care, and bring insects into those communities.
Three. Think About Collective Action Frames.
What are the overarching ideas that can shift public opinion in our favour towards the end of animal suffering, especially in farming and fishing? Whatever the ideas are, it is more likely that they are going to be effective if they are widely used and often heard—which is why groups working in coalition and collaboration can be an effective approach.
It will be effective if not just marching together but messaging together were the future model for the animal groups working to end animal farming and fishing. These “collective action frames” can easily include insects. Here are two ideas in which such inclusive and collective messaging could be based:
a. Oppression. As Paula Acari, a research fellow at the Centre for Human-Animal Studies at Edge Hill University has recently argued, much animal rights messaging (especially linking Covid to animal agriculture) is fragmented and piecemeal, and lacks cohesion and therefore collective power. We would do well to focus together on a powerful collective action frame to force cognitive challenges to the status quo practices of farming; these would link all breeding, feeding and killing, whether it be of cows, pigs or crickets. For Acari an “effective collective action frame could make sense of the apparently disconnected ways in which animals’ lives are expropriated, controlled, modified, and extinguished, lending legitimacy to the advocacy movement, their respective actions, and more importantly, the critical animal perspectives they ideally advance and support.” She offers “oppression” as a new transformational frame for animal advocacy rather than “rights”, which at the same time holds open space for animal advocacy to take into account many intersecting oppressions against humans and nonhumans alike.
b. Solidarity. Excellent research from psychologist Catherine Amiot and colleagues at the University of Quebec have shown in the framing of “solidarity with animals” (emphasising similarities and sense of camaraderie in the challenges of living) elicits pro-animal behaviours and beliefs beyond the impact of other frames (e.g. focusing on rights for animals). Showing solidarity with others is, for psychologists, an act where “we consider the ‘other’ as part of our self” and doing so means their interests are weighed heavily in our decision-making.
These collective action frames are particularly important for challenging what is called Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), which is a personality trait involving a preference for group-based hierarchies and social inequalities. That is, many people only value those in their group, and believe their group should dominate others. SDO is, for example, a personality trait with powerful predictors for negative intergroup attitudes like racism and sexism—and, as Jim Everett and colleagues found, speciesism.
If we can show the ways in which humans and insects, or insects and cows, are collectively oppressed, and if we can then show that there is good reason to offer solidarity to insects, then insects become part of the group, not outside the group. As such, attitudes towards them may change. The circle of compassion widens.
Are they worth it?
A large part of Peter Singer’s case for not launching campaigns to protect insects or provide them with rights is the utilitarian argument that we already know of the sentience and suffering of the many animals already exploited in agriculture, such as cows, pigs, chickens, and indeed in fishing. As such, we really must concentrate our efforts there, knowing how limited are our efforts, and how many pigs, cows, chickens and others already need our help.
But on a purely numbers-based analysis of suffering within farming, we would anyway soon have to focus our efforts on the amount of insect suffering first; then fishes, then land mammals. We cannot let such huge numbers of beings languish in suffering merely on the basis of their species. That would make us animal activists also more speciesist than we want to be.
But there may also be a tactical reason for doing so. Because insect farming is in its nascent stage, we could trouble this new form of farming in ways that go on to reverberate in other forms of animal farming. We should at the very least explore this possibility with new, novel strategies, that may easily tap into the disgust that many people (in the West) feel at eating insects - and extend this to other animals. The earlier we adopt these strategies - especially while insect farming is in these early, unstable stages - the more likely we are to develop tactics that work effectively.
WATCH: The Argument for Eating Insects (Instead of Going Vegan)
OTHER ARTICLES IN THE INSECT FARMING SERIES:
Dr Alex Lockwood is an academic and author of the vegan memoir The Pig in Thin Air, which makes the connection between climate change and the food we eat. He is writing a report for The Vegan Society on the policy we need for a UK plant-based food system.
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