Executive summary: This report quantifies and prioritizes the welfare threats faced by farmed shrimp, finding that chronic issues like high stocking density likely cause the most aggregate suffering despite uncertainty in the analysis.
Key points:
The report models 18 shrimp welfare threats along three dimensions: prevalence, duration, and intensity of suffering caused.
Shrimp aquaculture is estimated to cause 94 trillion hours of disabling-equivalent pain per year, a likely underestimate.
Chronic threats like high stocking density and lack of substrate rank as the most harmful overall, while acute threats to smaller populations (e.g. eyestalk ablation) rank lower.
Substantial uncertainty remains, especially around prevalence of issues, but the relative importance of chronic issues is fairly robust.
Prioritizing interventions should consider not just scale of harm, but also neglectedness, solvability, and strategic considerations.
Further research is needed on shrimp sentience and on-farm conditions to reduce uncertainty and determine if shrimp lives are net-positive.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: This report quantifies and prioritizes the welfare threats faced by farmed shrimp, finding that chronic issues like high stocking density likely cause the most aggregate suffering despite uncertainty in the analysis.
Key points:
The report models 18 shrimp welfare threats along three dimensions: prevalence, duration, and intensity of suffering caused.
Shrimp aquaculture is estimated to cause 94 trillion hours of disabling-equivalent pain per year, a likely underestimate.
Chronic threats like high stocking density and lack of substrate rank as the most harmful overall, while acute threats to smaller populations (e.g. eyestalk ablation) rank lower.
Substantial uncertainty remains, especially around prevalence of issues, but the relative importance of chronic issues is fairly robust.
Prioritizing interventions should consider not just scale of harm, but also neglectedness, solvability, and strategic considerations.
Further research is needed on shrimp sentience and on-farm conditions to reduce uncertainty and determine if shrimp lives are net-positive.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.