Farmed shrimp are produced at a scale of hundreds of billions of individuals per year, with significant welfare challenges and growing scientific evidence of crustacean sentience.
Shrimp welfare faces a double challenge: the evidence for crustacean sentience is growing but contested, and the scale of shrimp farming makes even small per-animal welfare improvements potentially enormous in aggregate. Eyestalk ablation is a clear welfare harm by any reasonable standard; the suffering involved in disease outbreaks is a further welfare concern at scale. The precautionary principle suggests that given the numbers involved, investing in shrimp welfare improvements is justified even under uncertainty about the precise nature of shrimp experience.