Shrimp are among the most numerically abundant farmed animals, yet slaughter methods for the estimated 440 billion shrimp killed annually are largely unregulated and may cause significant suffering if shrimp are capable of experiencing pain.
The welfare status of shrimp sits at the frontier of animal sentience science. While it would be wrong to overstate certainty about shrimp pain experience, the precautionary principle — act to prevent potential suffering when it cannot be ruled out — applies with particular force to a species killed in such astronomical numbers. The difference between improving and not improving shrimp slaughter methods is the potential suffering of hundreds of billions of animals annually. Even small probability-adjusted improvements in individual shrimp welfare, multiplied across this scale, represent an enormous expected welfare gain. Shrimp Welfare Project and allied organisations are making meaningful progress in working with producers to adopt less aversive slaughter methods.