Animal rights group Wakker Dier has written to farm minister Femke Wiersma calling for better protection for insects, billions of which are bred and killed in Dutch factories every year.

Wakker Dier calls the insect industry, which involves keeping and killing 70 billion insects a year, the “new factory farming” and wants the minister to come up with measures to ensure their well-being.

The industry focuses on black soldier flies and their larvae, which are ground down into powders and fats and used as various forms of animal and fish feed and fertiliser. The larvae are killed after 18 days, by being frozen, cooked or minced.

Insects are sentient beings that can experience pain and perhaps even fear, said philosopher Martijn van Loon, who is involved in research at Wageningen University and working on a thesis about insects’ mental capacity.

“There is a consensus among scientists that insects can experience pain,” he told the AD. “Proving this is difficult but even larvae react to pain stimuli, like heat or electric shocks.”

Insect farming for animal consumption is becoming a large-scale industry in the Netherlands. Protix, in Bergen op Zoom is the biggest insect farm in the country, processing tens of billions of black soldier fly larvae a year, mainly for feed for chickens, pigs and fish as well as fertiliser.

Protix, which says soy is a much less sustainable alternative to larvae, says on its website it strives to make sure the larvae are well cared for. “When it comes to processing, we strive to make the death of the larvae instantaneous. This way we reduce potential suffering to a minimum,” the company says in its animal welfare statement.

But there are currently no rules to ensure insects’ well-being and that must change, Wakker Dier said. “It is unacceptable that an industry that processes billions of animals and kills them can do whatever it likes,” said Wakker Dier’s Anne Hilhorst.

Van Loon said insects score low on cuteness which may influence society’s concerns about their well-being. “It is easier to feel empathy with pets, cattle, and monkeys,” he told the paper.

“But MPs have been calling for a ban on cooking lobsters alive in restaurants and those animals do not rank very highly in the empathy stakes either so perhaps the thinking about this type of issue is developing.”