Over 500 billion farmed shrimp are killed annually with almost no consideration of their capacity for suffering. Evidence of shrimp sentience is growing, making slaughter practices an urgent welfare issue.
Shrimp represent perhaps the largest welfare blind spot in aquaculture. Their enormous numbers — hundreds of billions annually — combined with their small size and taxonomic distance from mammals means their welfare is almost universally ignored. Yet the scientific evidence for shrimp sentience, while still debated, is substantial enough to warrant precautionary action. Live boiling and ice slurry methods are likely to cause suffering if shrimp can experience it. The Shrimp Welfare Project and similar organisations are working to develop and validate humane slaughter methods, but uptake is minimal because consumer and regulatory pressure is nearly absent. This mismatch between the scale of potential suffering and the level of concern is striking.