Improving farmed shrimp welfare with Shrimp Welfare Project

Shrimps are farmed in numbers that dwarf every other kind of livestock. Hundreds of billions are raised and killed each year, and until very recently almost nothing was asked about how they live or how they die. The standard slaughter method is chilling in an ice slurry, which does not kill quickly: the animal can stay conscious for minutes while it suffocates.

Electrical stunning renders a shrimp insensible in about a second, before it is killed. The machines exist and already run at commercial scale, but one costs far more than a producer in India, Vietnam or Ecuador will spend on a welfare improvement no buyer has asked for. So the program buys the stunners and hands them over, on the condition that the producer runs a defined volume of shrimps through the machine and reports on it.

What makes the arithmetic unusual is that the cost is paid once and the machine keeps working. A single processing line handles shrimps by the thousand every minute it runs, so one placement covers far more animals than the same money spent on almost any other farmed species.

Slaughter is the sharpest problem but not the only one. Ponds are commonly stocked densely enough to cause chronic stress and disease, and water quality is left to drift. Female broodstock routinely have an eyestalk cut or crushed to force them to spawn, without anaesthetic. The program works with farmers on stocking density, water quality and an end to eyestalk ablation, and supports a growing farmer network in India that puts those standards into ordinary practice.

Donating equipment one plant at a time does not by itself change an industry. Alongside it, the program negotiates with supermarkets and seafood importers, largely in the United Kingdom and Europe, to write stunning and welfare requirements into what they are willing to buy. Once a large retailer asks for stunned shrimp, its suppliers buy the machines themselves.

The organization doing this work is Shrimp Welfare Project, founded in 2021.

Gifts made through Rethink Charity come with an official Canadian donation receipt, which giving directly to a non-Canadian charity does not provide. This is a young and thinly funded field, so a modest gift is a real share of the total money spent on it. If you would rather let evaluators choose, the Animal Welfare Fund spreads gifts across several organizations.