Most people never think twice about shrimp. But as it turns out, these creatures make up the majority of animals alive on farms at any given time—hundreds of billions every year. And the conditions they endure are often horrifying. Overcrowding, eye mutilation, and inhumane slaughter methods are all standard practice. So why don’t we care?

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, chairman of the Shrimp Welfare Project, walks us through the shocking scale of global shrimp farming, the mounting scientific evidence for shrimp sentience, and the practical reforms that can drastically reduce animal suffering.

Nathan J. Robinson  

I absolutely had to talk to you because you wrote an article recently for Asterisk Magazine that has two wonderful opening lines. It begins, "I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind." As an opener for an article, that's a killer. I love that. I had to just keep reading after that. What it gets at is that anyone who leaves private equity, which is a famously lucrative profession, to work on shrimp welfare has to become convinced that shrimp welfare is incredibly important. The average person will wonder: what could possibly have made you make that choice? It's probably safe to say most people have not given a second consideration to shrimp welfare. Tell us about that life choice to shift from money-making to the welfare of farm shrimp.

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla 

I appreciate you touching upon that because I do think that most people would assume that I have lost my mind, and I think that was my first reaction when I read about the problem of shrimp as a "moral patient." But the more I looked into it, the more I followed the evidence of the staggering number of individual shrimp that are farmed every year, which stands at approximately half a trillion per year. [There's] evidence of their sentience, [...] and [it has been] completely neglected. Essentially no more than maybe one or two, if any, people in the whole world were trying to improve the situation. My co-founder and I thought that this was very important for us to focus on. So I appreciate your time.

Robinson 

[In] the article, you do a good job of convincing people to start thinking about something that they probably haven't thought about before. And there's this famous term "the charismatic megafauna," that is, the animals people care about. Like the pandas. They're cute. We all love the pandas. We all love Moo Deng, the famous hippo. Just charismatic megafauna. You work on what I would consider the opposite end of the spectrum, which is the uncharismatic microfauna: the animals that aren't nearly as photogenic in the human sense. You're really trying to make the case for a creature that does not possess the qualities that lead human beings to be naturally sympathetic to it, such as our concept of cuteness. But you argue that's not morally relevant.

Zorrilla 

I think I've lost my sense of aesthetics when it comes to animals. Someone once asked me for cute shrimp pictures, and I sent them a few, and they responded, well, clearly, you've been at this for way too long. [...] This is one of the reasons why people haven't focused on this very important problem. Now, there are some folks who are focusing on even smaller, less sympathy-[provoking] animals like insects, but at least when we launched the organization, we were definitely on the fringe. But, as you said, strangely enough, aesthetic needs and cuteness are not variables that should influence our perception of moral patienthood. [It] sounds extremely obvious when you say it out loud. But it's not an intuition that most of us grow up with.

Robinson  

So we set aside our natural intuitions and prejudices, and we start to think rationally and say, okay, we believe in animal rights as a basic principle—we certainly would apply the ideas to our dogs and our cats. What you take us through is the reasoning process that gets us to why we should care about shrimp. And it seems to me, from your article, that this has two components. The first is the evidence that shrimp can have experience, that they are sentient beings that can, in fact, suffer. And then the second is the kind of quantitative element, which is rather shocking—and maybe, actually, we could take those in the opposite order. I think one of the things that really is mind-blowing about your article is the quantitative data on just how many shrimp are farmed in the world. I don't think people realize the percentage of animal farming that is just shrimp.

Zorrilla 

Absolutely. And basically, when my co-founder and I launched the organization, it was the quantitative part of it that really hooked us. Because back then, these animals had been less studied than they have been today. But just when you think of the numbers, roughly half a trillion shrimp are farmed every year. To give you perspective, around 100 billion humans have ever walked the earth. We grow and slaughter around five times that number of shrimp every year. So in terms of the numbers, it's huge. And if you compare it to the number of total land farm animals, for example, to give a sense of the magnitude of the numbers that we're speaking about, all put together—cattle, chicken, etc.—that would be roughly between 80 and 90 billion animals every year. For two species of shrimp alone, it's approximately 500 billion—half a trillion. So when we're talking really about factory farming worldwide, we are really talking about shrimp.

Robinson

You have this incredible pie chart. It's eye-opening to look at that one pie chart, which is the number of animals alive on farms at any moment, and it's mostly shrimp—it's 51 percent shrimp. The majority of animals on farms at any even time in the entire world are shrimp, and cattle and pigs are less than one percent. So it's not an exaggeration, what you just said, that when we're talking about the farming of animals and add them up individually, it is mostly shrimp out there.

Zorrilla  

Yes. And this work was done by Rethink Priorities. This has a lot of work behind it, but essentially, it is the species that is by far the most [represented] at any given moment on farms.

Robinson

Where are all these shrimp going? Is it that every country just eats a lot of seafood? You've studied the industry, so what's going on here? How did we get to the point where shrimp are the majority of animals alive on farms at any given moment?

Zorrilla 

I think it's threefold. The total volume of shrimp consumed in the world is about 6 million metric tons. So that's already a lot, but I think what makes it much greater in terms of the number of animals alive at any moment is the fact that they are small animals. So if you divide the number of cows that you would need to feed a family, the number of shrimp to provide them with the equivalent amount of animal protein is much greater. So that's one part. And the other one is they have a very short life cycle and are being produced—harvested and slaughtered—two or three times a year. So those would be the explaining factors. And we haven't even touched upon the number of shrimp that are caught in the wild. [Those numbers are] just mind-blowing. They're on the order of 30 trillion shrimp per year. This also comes from this paper that I refer to from Rethink Priorities in my article. It's not in the article because my organization focuses exclusively on farmed shrimp at the moment, but the number of wild caught shrimp is also astronomical.

Robinson 

But to get to why this is a problem worth working on, we have to go back to the moral dimension of what happens to shrimp. And this is where I think you have [a] heavy burden. People can look at this pie chart, and they could say, wow, that's a surprising fact—I'd never thought about that before. But they could say, and probably many of them do say, but I don't really care. I care about the cattle and the pigs because I know that pigs and cattle are like dogs. They feel emotions. They are sophisticated creatures. With shrimp, we can eat as many of them as we like, because they're shrimp. They're tiny, as you said. Why should anyone care what happens to a shrimp? They're so unsophisticated. And so this is where you lay out all the evidence and research that [justifies] a moral [consideration] of what happens to a shrimp.

Zorrilla

Correct. We can unfold it, and there are two things. It's either they're not sentient and we don't care, or they're sentient and the conditions and farms are great, and again, we don't care. Okay, so we need to talk about both. The first one is the evidence of sentience. When we launched the organization, the evidence of sentience was relatively limited. But fortunately for us, right after we launched the organization, the U.K. government, as part of a revamp of their animal welfare legislation, commissioned a report from the London School of Economics to look at the evidence of cephalopods and decapods. Cephalopods are octopuses and squid, and decapods are crabs, lobsters, and shrimp. And because there is no smoking gun to decide whether a system is sentient or not, even with humans, I need to assume that you're sentient because you're similar to me and because you're telling me that you are feeling something. But I cannot definitively prove from outside that you are feeling what you're telling me that you're feeling.

So what researchers do with animals is that they look at behavioral proxies for sentience that would indicate something similar to what we can appreciate in humans. And that's what the researchers at the London School of Economics did. They looked at a number of different elements, including having the right body parts to feel pain, so nociceptors, and having the right neural architecture to feel that pain and to integrate it, and then to see the responses that animals show to different noxious stimuli.

So they have eight different criteria, and they rank the degree of evidence that one has in each of them. And if we look at the decapod family as a whole, there is very strong evidence that they fulfill either strongly or very strongly each of these eight categories. So the recommendation from researchers was to unequivocally include decapods, which include shrimp, as animals recognized as sentient in the new animal welfare law. And then at Rethink Priorities, Bob Fischer and his team prepared a very interesting piece as well called the Welfare Range Table, where they look at hundreds of different behaviors that would indicate sentience. This is a much more in-depth analysis of the existing evidence, and they see that shrimp can show anxiety-like states. They tend to their wounds, and this behavior is different when you apply anesthetics or analgesics, which would suggest that it is not a reflex. So there are a number of behaviors that, all put together, would strongly indicate that there's something going on in there.

Robinson 

You're talking there about people who've applied a very systematic and careful method to really quantify a degree of confidence in sentience. But I've heard you mention before in a conversation that one kind of counterintuitive or unexpected thing is that the people who farm shrimp tend—more than the general public, when you survey them—to believe in the sentience of shrimp. And you might [...] expect them to be indifferent. But actually, they understand this perhaps better than the average member of the general public.

Zorrilla   

That's an extremely good point. We ran a survey of farmers in India one year after having launched the organization. And if my memory serves me well, it was something like 90 to 95 percent of the farmers that we interviewed, when we asked them the question,
do you think that your shrimp can feel pain? they all said, yes. Even one had a very endearing quote and said something like, when my shrimp are happy, I am happy, and if they are sad, I suffer too. Because they are much more attuned to, I wouldn't say individuality, but they see these animals when they're alive and showing their natural behaviors. Most people who eat shrimp, at least in the developed world, have never seen a live shrimp in their lives. So that makes a huge difference to the way that we relate to an animal.

Robinson  

Now, you mentioned earlier that there is the question of whether shrimp are sentient, and you have touched on some of the evidence that they can feel pain. But you said that we could say, okay, but the conditions are fine. So, then we get to that second part that you mentioned, which is the inquiry into how shrimp are farmed and whether they are farmed in a way that raises a serious moral issue. Obviously, you have concluded that for point number one, they are sentient. But for point number two, they are farmed in ways that are abhorrent, that hurt them, and that are avoidable. So tell us a little bit more about the conditions that shrimp are raised under that you think makes this a compelling moral issue.

Zorrilla

Sure, and one important point to mention right off the bat is that not every shrimp suffers from all the elements that I will mention. Perhaps some don't. I think, for the most part, they do. But a normal life in a typical farming environment for shrimp [means that] a female has its eye cut off. That's the way that the life of a farm shrimp starts. So researchers a few decades ago realized that by removing, by crushing, one of the eyes of a female, they would start laying eggs more predictably, and it's easier to have a female reproduce and spawn when this eye is removed. So the first thing is that an eye is cut off from a female, without any anesthetic, obviously. This female lays hundreds of thousands of eggs. These eggs eventually hatch, and so you have baby shrimp. Of these baby shrimp, between natural mortality that happens in this early stage and cannibalism at this early stage, about 50 percent of those, roughly, would die. Of the ones that survive, they are then, after a few days, transferred into either an intermediate pond, or what they call a grow-out pond, where they would live for the next three to four months. And there, the conditions vary, but you have two ends of the spectrum.

On one end, you can have a system where the water can be controlled to the most minute element of it: a small tank where dissolved oxygen is monitored and maintained, where the presence of poisonous gasses are detected and eliminated and managed. But typically, because of all the investment that these systems require, the animals are overcrowded, and they cannot express their natural behaviors, which tend to be that they burrow under the sand and rest at the bottom of a pond. Because they're packed so tightly, they need to be swimming all the time and really cannot express their natural behaviors. They're really stressed, and if you have a disease outbreak, this can spread very quickly.

On the other side of the spectrum, you sometimes have ponds that are very large with very low stocking densities—only five to 10 animals per square meter, versus the other system that I mentioned which is probably 500 per square meter. In these other systems, the animals can express their natural behaviors, but because it's a larger pond, it behaves more like a natural ecosystem. And there you have fluctuating levels of dissolved oxygen and poisonous gasses. And here the problem is that you can have animals with very poor immune systems, and again, disease outbreaks. This is just a normal thing that happens in shrimp farming. In these types of ponds, it's frequent that you have mortality rates of 30 to 40 percent of all the animals that were put initially in this kind of pond.

And the last element of shrimp farming would be a harvest, which is the moment in which the animals are taken out of the water and slaughtered. The gold standard is to submerge the shrimps in cold ice, in ice slurry, and that has proven to be not effective enough to render animals unconscious when you look at the brain activity using the EEG method. It actually appears to be a very painful experience, and this is a gold standard, typically, before Shrimp Welfare Project started with its Humane Slaughter Initiative, which I'm sure we will touch upon.

Robinson

So you're inherently engaged in harm mitigation rather than elimination [of farming]. Given the sheer volume that you're looking at here, the idea of eliminating the consumption of shrimp overnight is inconceivable. So I take it that you've thought a lot about, well, what are some feasible recommendations that could be adopted? What are some standards that, given the industry that we have in the world as it exists now, we think might be adopted that would go some way towards eliminating the worst aspects of this? You emphasize the cutting of the eyes. Maybe we can get rid of that. Maybe we can have shrimp more in an environment that resembles what they would have naturally. Pragmatically, if we've accomplished the very hard part of getting people to take shrimp welfare seriously, we're not going to accomplish the impossible part of eliminating the farming of shrimp tomorrow. And so what are the things that you think are best practice legislation that we can encourage the adoption of today? 

Zorrilla

I think the best thing that consumers can do is to ask their local supermarket to commit to higher welfare standards. We have seen this now in the U.K. Half of the retail industry in the U.K. now has committed to high shrimp welfare standards, eliminating eyestalk ablation and incorporating electrical stunning to make the slaughter process painless to animals. And this really comes on the back of consumers reaching out to their supermarket and saying, hey, I like to eat shrimp, but I would like my shrimp to have been produced in the most ethical way possible. And the most ethical way possible from a retailer perspective, when they pass policies [such as in] Europe, [is to] ask their suppliers: you can no longer use eyestalk ablation as a method of spawning baby shrimps; you need to incorporate electrical stunning—so you need to incorporate humane tech to reduce suffering at the moment of death—adjusting stocking densities to the actual number of animals that each system can carry comfortably and not stretch it to the limit; and finally, guaranteeing certain water quality parameters are met so that there is enough dissolved oxygen for the animals to breathe in water and the absence of certain poisonous gasses that are detrimental to animal welfare. But first and foremost, what people can do is reach out to their shrimp dealer and ask them to source from certified shrimp and just to always push the envelope of what the level of welfare of their supply chain should be.

Robinson

We recently interviewed Dulce Ramírez of Animal Equality in Mexico about [incorporating] animal rights into the Mexican Constitution, which was a major victory. One of the things I discussed with her was the fact that anyone working on animal rights and animal welfare always faces this real uphill struggle because it's inevitably [a lower priority issue]. Here in the United States, there's like 100 serious crises going on at any one time politically. And so to start to talk about animals, you feel like, well, we'll talk about animals when we've dealt with whatever these five present catastrophes are. And then, if you talk about the smaller animals, you really have a challenge, as we talked about in the early part of this conversation.

But [...] the positive thing is that there are measures that can be taken that substantially reduce the amount of suffering in the world, and your organization and this movement has, in fact, succeeded at getting some of these measures put in place by retailers, and then it has a result. It doesn't have an easy to see result because the shrimp can't write notes and thank you, but it has a payoff in that you've managed to successfully reduce a huge amount of suffering in the world. So I think one of the things we can emphasize here at the end of this conversation is the way that this issue, which may seem initially a quixotic or even utopian issue, is a quite practical way of making the world a much less horrible and harmful place for numerous conscious creatures.

Zorrilla 

I couldn't agree more. And as a corollary to that, typically, both governments and retailers and generally corporations are comprised of individuals, and many individuals genuinely care about the welfare of animals that they are in charge of, and those individuals will be receptive and can effect change inside organizations or inside governments. But they will not be aware that this is an issue that's important to other folks, and they potentially won't even be aware of the issue if we don't make it salient. And thankfully, as you said, these very welfare improving interventions, or suffering reducing interventions, should not be expensive for suppliers. There are organizations like what I started, but I'm sure there are others that can support the industry to transition to higher welfare practices and would be very keen to do so.

Robinson  

We certainly appreciate your taking the leap from the amoral world of finance to working on something like shrimp welfare. [...] People should read your article, which is very compelling, in Asterisk Magazine, and they should go to the Shrimp Welfare Project to find out more about what you've done so far and what can be done in the future.

Transcript edited byPatrick Farnsworth.