Attitudes to animal welfare are changing rapidly and are strongly influenced by the species and context concerned.
Animal welfare legislation in the UK focuses almost exclusively on vertebrates which, until recently, were believed to be the only animals capable of sentience and pain perception.
There is currently no requirement in the UK to consider invertebrate welfare for any intervention on farmland aimed at a conservation goal. WildCRU researchers have developed a framework to do this, using Lepidoptera as a model group. The work identified how different species are affected by various farm practices, highlighting the huge scale of the issue given the land area and numbers of individuals affected.
This work provides a framework for evaluating invertebrate welfare and highlights ethical issues for conservation policy.