In our code, we estimate that shrimp live on ongrowing farms (this analysis doesn’t look at earlier stages of production) for about 115 days*24 hours = 2,760 hours. However, due to preslaughter mortality and variation in when farmers choose to harvest, the 90% interval is [~14 days, ~175 days].
The total raw number of hours in pain exceeds the lifespan of the average shrimp because we examined each welfare threat in isolation, whereas in practice many are occurring concurrently. This is an issue Welfare Footprint has considered but for simplicity we do not address it here. We do note, “We assume purely additive relationships between welfare threats. This means that some estimates of time spent in pain can exceed the lifespan of a shrimp.” But I am glad for the opportunity to mention this again, as it is also an example of why we caution against treating our headline results as representative of the life of an actual shrimp.
Hey Vasco,
In our code, we estimate that shrimp live on ongrowing farms (this analysis doesn’t look at earlier stages of production) for about 115 days*24 hours = 2,760 hours. However, due to preslaughter mortality and variation in when farmers choose to harvest, the 90% interval is [~14 days, ~175 days].
The total raw number of hours in pain exceeds the lifespan of the average shrimp because we examined each welfare threat in isolation, whereas in practice many are occurring concurrently. This is an issue Welfare Footprint has considered but for simplicity we do not address it here. We do note, “We assume purely additive relationships between welfare threats. This means that some estimates of time spent in pain can exceed the lifespan of a shrimp.” But I am glad for the opportunity to mention this again, as it is also an example of why we caution against treating our headline results as representative of the life of an actual shrimp.
For more context, see also Box 2 and Figure 1 of Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp.
Thanks for clarifying, William!