With over 500 billion farmed shrimp produced annually, the welfare of these crustaceans during harvest and slaughter is an emerging area of concern as evidence for crustacean sentience strengthens.
Farmed shrimp welfare sits at the frontier of animal welfare science, where evolving evidence about crustacean sentience intersects with enormous production scale. The 2021 LSE review and subsequent UK legal recognition of decapod crustacean sentience shifted the scientific consensus significantly. If shrimp experience pain and distress, the welfare implications of current harvest and slaughter practices — involving live handling, sorting, and often death by asphyxiation or ice slurry — are enormous given the billions of individuals involved. The Shrimp Welfare Project is pioneering practical welfare improvement strategies, recognising that even small per-animal improvements, multiplied by hundreds of billions of individuals, produce massive aggregate welfare gains.