With over 500 billion farmed shrimp produced annually, slaughter welfare represents one of the largest potential sources of preventable animal suffering in food production.
Shrimp slaughter welfare confronts us with one of the most challenging welfare mathematics in animal ethics: enormous numbers of animals whose sentience is uncertain but increasingly supported by evidence, killed by methods designed when their capacity for pain was dismissed. The scale is staggering — more shrimp are farmed annually than all other farmed animals combined by orders of magnitude. If shrimp feel pain — and the evidence increasingly suggests they can — the aggregate welfare impact of current slaughter practices is immense. The precautionary principle, increasingly enshrined in welfare law, suggests that we should apply humane killing methods to crustaceans in the absence of certainty about their sentience, not after it is proved beyond doubt.