As an outsider to the field, is there a quick 3-sentence pitch as to why farmed shrimp welfare is specifically important (as opposed to any other farmed animal?) I skimmed through the report for this info but may well have missed it.
My quick read of welfare points is that it’s a per-animal metric—did I get that right? If so I’m somewhat hesitant to equate the wellbeing of one eg cow to one shrimp.
Apologies for the belated response, I missed this!
The pitch for shrimp welfare would be similar to the pitch of invertebrate welfare in general where even if the case for shrimp sentience is weaker than the case for mammal, bird, and fish sentience, the expected value of helping shrimp might be higher than the expected value of helping mammals, birds, and fish due to the large scale of their suffering. For example, fishcount estimate that 51-167 billion fish were slaughtered in 2017, and 210-530 billion shrimps and prawns were slaughtered.
I think the case for working to end the practice of eyestalk ablation is particularly strong as it is such a horrific practice that it could be seen as low hanging fruit. This could then be a good ‘foot-in-the-door’ for other shrimp welfare issues.
Yeah, welfare points are a per-animal metric, but they are discounted by our best guess at the likelihood of sentience of each animal so we have estimated that shrimp have a 10% likelihood of sentience and cows, to use your example, have a 75% likelihood of sentience. So an intervention that affects shrimp would have to affect sufficiently more welfare points than an intervention that affects cow to be considered cost-effective. I hope this makes sense!
As an outsider to the field, is there a quick 3-sentence pitch as to why farmed shrimp welfare is specifically important (as opposed to any other farmed animal?) I skimmed through the report for this info but may well have missed it.
My quick read of welfare points is that it’s a per-animal metric—did I get that right? If so I’m somewhat hesitant to equate the wellbeing of one eg cow to one shrimp.
Apologies for the belated response, I missed this!
The pitch for shrimp welfare would be similar to the pitch of invertebrate welfare in general where even if the case for shrimp sentience is weaker than the case for mammal, bird, and fish sentience, the expected value of helping shrimp might be higher than the expected value of helping mammals, birds, and fish due to the large scale of their suffering. For example, fishcount estimate that 51-167 billion fish were slaughtered in 2017, and 210-530 billion shrimps and prawns were slaughtered.
I think the case for working to end the practice of eyestalk ablation is particularly strong as it is such a horrific practice that it could be seen as low hanging fruit. This could then be a good ‘foot-in-the-door’ for other shrimp welfare issues.
Yeah, welfare points are a per-animal metric, but they are discounted by our best guess at the likelihood of sentience of each animal so we have estimated that shrimp have a 10% likelihood of sentience and cows, to use your example, have a 75% likelihood of sentience. So an intervention that affects shrimp would have to affect sufficiently more welfare points than an intervention that affects cow to be considered cost-effective. I hope this makes sense!