Shrimp welfare certification is an emerging area where several schemes are beginning to incorporate welfare indicators alongside environmental sustainability, though significant gaps remain.
Shrimp welfare certification is in early development, lagging behind fish welfare standards considerably. The scale of shrimp production - involving numbers of individual animals comparable to or exceeding total global vertebrate livestock production - means that even marginal improvements in welfare standards have enormous aggregate impact. The emerging consensus in welfare science that shrimp and other decapods have welfare-relevant sentience creates a moral imperative to develop and implement meaningful certification standards. Current schemes address some welfare-relevant parameters (water quality, disease management) as proxies, but explicit welfare standards with behavioral indicators are still being developed.