The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.
After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.
This may seem like an extreme stance. Shrimp aren't high on the list of animals most people think about when they consider the harms of industrial agriculture. For a long time — up until the last few years — most researchers assumed shrimp couldn't even feel pain. Yet as philosopher Jonathan Birch explains in The Edge of Sentience, whenever a creature is a sentience candidate and we cannot rule out its capacity for conscious experience, we have a responsibility to take its potential for suffering seriously.
We don’t know what it is like to be a shrimp. We do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions.
Counting billions
Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. For perspective: that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally, 27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish.
Despite their size, shrimp are the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing animal welfare in food systems. (...)
Shrimp’s nervous system, behavior, and estimated welfare capacity all point toward meaningful sentience. The fact that they haven't been studied as extensively as some other animals should not blind us to the evidence we do have, nor to their evident similarities with better-studied relatives. (...)
Beyond the water
In modern shrimp farming, life begins in a hatchery born to a mother who has endured one of the industry's most severe practices: eyestalk ablation. This procedure involves physically cutting off the appendage from which her eyes protrude — imagine having your optic nerve severed and your entire eye removed, all without anaesthesia. This mutilation, designed to induce spawning, sets the tone for a life marked by intensive farming practices.
At just a few days old, the young shrimp is transferred to a grow-out pond where it will spend the next three to six months of its life. In super-intensive systems, which represent a non-negligible portion of the industry in some regions, 500 to 1,000 shrimp are packed into each square meter. For a creature that grows to 13 centimeters in length, this density makes it impossible to perform natural behaviors like burrowing or resting on the bottom. Instead, the shrimp must swim continuously in the crowded space.
Poor water quality poses a persistent threat, regardless of stocking density. Just as humans need clean air to breathe, shrimp require clean water to survive. Their environment is often impacted by fluctuating oxygen levels and the presence of toxic gases — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from accumulated waste, to name two. In densely packed systems, these challenges become especially dangerous as a single water quality mishap can rapidly cascade into a mass mortality event. These conditions weaken their immune systems, leading to widespread disease. In what is considered a successful harvest, 20 to 30% of the population may die before reaching market size.
Those who survive face an ending that recent research suggests may be more cruel than previously thought. In the best-case scenario, they're immersed in ice slurry, a practice long considered humane. However, emerging evidence from EEG studies indicates this method merely paralyses the shrimp while still leaving them conscious and capable of feeling pain for an extended period. In many cases, the reality is even harsher — some are left on crates for several minutes to drain excess water weight, while others are forced to endure long-distance transport in severely under-oxygenated barrels for up to eight hours, journeys that can stretch hundreds of kilometers from farm to market.
To be clear, not all shrimp experience every welfare concern listed here, nor do most shrimp suffer from all of them simultaneously. However, these issues arise so frequently that nearly all shrimp will likely experience at least two or more of these welfare violations during their lives.
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production (RP).]
