Shrimp are among the most consumed seafood globally, but their welfare in intensive aquaculture receives minimal attention despite growing evidence of their capacity for pain.
Shrimp welfare is at the frontier of animal welfare science. Crustacean sentience is more contested than vertebrate sentience, but the precautionary principle — given the staggering numbers involved — argues for taking it seriously. Eyestalk ablation is the practice with the clearest welfare case against it: it is painful, it is performed on animals that show clear stress responses, and it is done to maximise hatchery productivity at the cost of individual suffering. Alternatives to ablation that do not require mutilation are being developed and some producers have begun transitioning. The scale of shrimp production means that even small per-individual welfare improvements, multiplied across hundreds of billions of animals, have enormous aggregate impact.