Shrimp aquaculture produces over 5 million tonnes annually, involving potentially hundreds of billions of individual animals. The welfare of these crustaceans presents profound questions given their scale and our uncertainty about their sentience.
Shrimp welfare represents one of the most challenging frontiers in animal welfare due to scale and scientific uncertainty. Eyestalk ablation — a painful mutilation used routinely in broodstock management — causes clear nociceptive responses. High-density rearing creates chronic stress, disease vulnerability, and probable suffering at large scale. The Shrimp Welfare Project has identified this as a high-priority intervention area because the scale of shrimp farming means even small welfare improvements per animal aggregate to enormous reductions in suffering. Replacing eyestalk ablation with photoperiod manipulation, improving water quality, and developing more humane killing methods are all tractable improvements.