Considering shrimp farming on International Animal Rights Day

December 10th marks International Animal Rights Day, coinciding with International Human Rights Day to highlight that all sentient beings deserve protection. On this day, animal advocates across the globe host events calling attention to animal exploitation while envisioning a future with greater respect for all sentient beings.

At Animal Ethics, we want to highlight that this is a day to remember the importance of defending animals and of ending speciesism.

This year we want to talk about some of the most forgotten and numerous victims of speciesism: shrimps.

Every day, hundreds of billions of tiny individuals are packed into crowded ponds around the world. At any given moment, there are over 200 billion shrimps in farms – more than any other farmed animal. In fact, more shrimps are killed for food in farms than any other animal, with approximately 440 billion killed each year. As countries become wealthier, their consumption of shrimps increases, meaning this massive exploitation is likely to keep growing.¹

Yet most of us have never stopped to wonder: What can they feel? What is their experience like?

Imagine yourself in the place of a shrimp

Before we learn more about these beings, take a moment to reflect: What do you think a shrimp feels? If you were in their body, what sensations would you experience?

Meet Maya. She’s exploring the ocean floor, waving her sensitive antennae to taste the water around her. Like you, Maya can sense when water is too hot or too cold. Like you, she’ll quickly pull away from anything that might harm her. Like you, she feels pain when injured and seeks safety when threatened. In fact, the evidence for shrimps’ ability to feel pain is so compelling that the United Kingdom has legally recognized them as sentient beings.

Maya is a shrimp.

Discovering what shrimps feel

To understand what shrimps like Maya might experience, let’s look at what scientists have discovered.

Do shrimps have the anatomical structures to feel pain?

Just like we have special nerve cells to detect pain, scientists have found that shrimps have similar cells throughout their bodies. These nociceptors (pain detectors) send signals when they detect harmful things. Like us, shrimps have centralized nervous systems that can process these signals and create feelings of pain.

Do shrimps behave like they feel pain?

Scientists tested this by looking for complex responses that go beyond simple reflexes. They found that shrimps:

· Change their normal feeding and social behaviors when injured

· Learn to avoid places where they experienced harm, even long after the initial experience

· Make trade-offs between avoiding harm and seeking food

· Show behavioral changes after injury that can be reduced with pain-relieving drugs

What science reveals

Evidence of pain

When we look at all this evidence – their pain sensors, their learning abilities, their responses to injury – what can we conclude? These things don’t tell us exactly how shrimps experience the world. We may never know precisely what it feels like to be a shrimp. But we do know they have the physical structures to feel pain and show clear signs of experiencing it.

Evidence of learning

Remember a time you touched something too hot and got burned. Even weeks later, you probably approached similar objects more carefully. Scientists have observed shrimps showing this same kind of learning.

This evidence of learning suggests shrimps feel pain, rather than just reflexively responding to harmful situations.

Evidence of sentience is not absolute proof, but this evidence is pretty strong. When hundreds of billions of individuals might be capable of suffering, we have good reasons to be careful. Think about it this way: if you saw someone about to step on what might be your friend’s foot, would you wait until you were absolutely certain it would hurt before warning them? Or would you speak up, just in case?

We don’t need to be 100% certain that shrimps feel pain to decide they deserve our consideration. The evidence suggesting they can suffer is strong enough that we should take it seriously.

Behind farm walls

While shrimps evolved to move through open waters, using their sensitive antennae to navigate and detect their surroundings, farmed shrimps are packed together in crowded ponds. Think about how overwhelming it feels when too many people are touching you at once, or when strong smells or bright lights bombard your senses. Now imagine your primary way of understanding your environment – like our vision or touch – being constantly overwhelmed. This is what farmed shrimps endure every day of their lives.

Approximately half of farmed shrimps die before even reaching slaughter age.² The water they live in often contains waste and chemicals that would irritate their sensitive bodies. Many develop likely painful infections because of these conditions.

When they kill the shrimps, exploiters typically pull them from the water and pack the shrimps in ice while they are still alive. Studies have shown that shrimps actively try to avoid water temperatures that are too hot or too cold. Being packed in ice is far more extreme than the temperature changes they have to endure in nature.

The situation is even more dire when we consider that shrimp farming is just one part of a larger problem. Every year, fishing operations kill tens of trillions of shrimps,³ and a much higher number of aquatic animals in total. In response to concerns about overfishing, many organizations, including the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), are promoting aquaculture – including shrimp farming – as a more sustainable alternative.⁴ But this “solution” would simply shift the suffering from wild-caught animals to farmed ones, greatly increasing the total number of individuals subjected to intensive confinement.

A new way of seeing

It’s understandable that we find it harder to empathize with shrimps than with animals who look more like us. We can’t see expressions of pain on their faces or hear cries of distress. But our difficulty in relating to their experiences doesn’t make their suffering any less real.

Some people say, “But they’re just shrimps.” Now that we know about their ability to feel pain and distress, we have to ask ourselves: does their small size or their difference from us make their suffering less important? If a being can suffer, shouldn’t we care about that suffering, regardless of what they look like or how different they are from us?

The scale of this suffering is staggering – more shrimps are killed for food than any other animal in the world.⁵ But numbers this large can make us numb to what matters: each shrimp is an individual who can feel pain and distress.

When we understand that shrimps can suffer, we have to ask ourselves some important questions:

· If we’re uncertain about how much they can feel, but have good evidence they can suffer, what’s the most ethical way to act?

· How should we respond when we learn that our actions might be causing suffering and death?

· What are our responsibilities to individuals who can suffer, regardless of how different they are from us?

These questions aren’t about convenience or taste preferences. They’re about what we owe to other beings who can feel pain, distress and pleasure. Once we recognize that shrimps are individuals capable of suffering, don’t we have a responsibility to consider their interests when making our choices?

When we started this exploration, we met Maya, a shrimp using her sensitive antennae to experience her world. We learned that shrimps, like Maya, have the physical structures to feel pain, and they show clear signs of experiencing it. We saw evidence that they actively avoid harmful situations and remember what causes them distress or gives them pleasure.

This knowledge comes with responsibility. While we may never know exactly what it feels like to be a shrimp, the evidence of their capacity to suffer is strong enough that we can’t simply ignore it. Each of the billions of shrimps in farms is an individual who can feel pain or seek what gives them positive experiences, just like Maya.

The issue isn’t just about making their captivity less painful. These are individuals who have their own lives to live. Even if we could eliminate all suffering in shrimp farms, we would still be wrongly depriving sentient beings of their lives. When we recognize shrimps as individuals who can feel and suffer, we must question not just how they are treated, but our assumption that we have the right to exploit and kill them at all.

It’s crucial to understand this issue in its broader context. The FAO and other international organizations are actively working to expand and intensify aquaculture operations worldwide to meet growing global demand for eating sea animals. That would lead to tens or hundreds of trillions of aquatic animals confined and killed every year.What changes when we stop seeing shrimps as tiny, anonymous creatures and start seeing them as individuals who can suffer? This shift in perspective asks us to examine not just what we know, but what we’re going to do with that knowledge.

At Animal Ethics, we’re shifting more of our focus to the exploitation of invertebrates, which is on a course to expand and intensify in the next few decades. We’ve already seen early campaigns by animal advocates lead to bans of octopus farming in some US states before it even started, and a national ban is being considered. Please support our work and help us continue to spread awareness about the harms of invertebrate farming!

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Further readings

Bae, S-H.; Tomoyuki; O.; Bong, J. K. & Wilder, M. N. (2013) “Alterations of pattern in immune response and vitellogenesis during induced ovarian development by unilateral and bilateral ablation in Litopenaeus vannamei”, Fish Science, 79, pp. 895-903.

Perazzolo, L. M.; Gargioni, R.; Ogliari, P.; Margherita, A. A. & Barracco, M. A. A. (2002) “Evaluation of some hemato-immunological parameters in the shrimp Farfantepenaeus paulensis submitted to environmental and physiological stress”, Aquaculture, 214, pp. 19-33 [accessed on 27 November 2024].

Sainz-Hernández, J. C.; Racotta, I. S.; Silvie, D.; Hernández-López, J. (2008) “Effect of unilateral and bilateral eyestalk ablation in Litopenaeus vannamei male and female on several metabolic and immunologic variables”, Aquaculture, 283, pp. 188-193.

Zacarias, S.; Carboni, S.; Davie, A. & Little, D. C. (2019) “Reproductive performance and offspring quality of non-ablated Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) under intensive commercial scale conditions”, Aquaculture, 503, pp. 460-466.

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Notes