Disease outbreaks are the greatest welfare and economic challenge in shrimp farming, causing mass mortality events. How disease is prevented and managed has profound implications for the welfare of billions of individual animals.
Disease outbreaks in shrimp farms represent some of the most numerically significant acute welfare events in animal agriculture. A single whitespot outbreak killing millions of shrimp in a pond within days represents an enormous quantity of suffering — even if the probability that individual shrimp experience subjective distress is uncertain and debated. The dying process from viral haemorrhagic diseases is prolonged relative to rapid slaughter. The stress of high-density farming environments — a primary driver of disease vulnerability — compounds the baseline welfare burden. Antibiotic treatments used to manage bacterial diseases create antibiotic resistance with broader public health implications. Welfare-conscious disease management prioritises prevention through biosecurity and water quality management, reducing both the number of disease events and the suffering associated with them.