Examining the welfare of farmed shrimp at the point of harvest and what more humane slaughter methods are emerging.
Shrimp slaughter welfare sits at the intersection of scientific uncertainty and moral precaution. The current state of decapod sentience research - including the LSE 2021 review that concluded shrimp are probably sentient to some degree - suggests that the standard practice of ice slurry immersion without pre-stunning may cause suffering if shrimp are capable of experiencing it. Given the extraordinary scale of global shrimp production, even a low probability of sentience aggregated across hundreds of billions of individuals represents a potential welfare problem of enormous magnitude. The precautionary principle argues for developing and adopting better slaughter methods now rather than waiting for sentience certainty that may never arrive.