Shrimp - The animals most commonly used and killed for food production (Rethink Priorities)

Summary

• Decapod crustaceans or, for short, decapods<a href=\"#fnref1\">1 (e.g., crabs, shrimp, or crayfish) represent a major food source for humans across the globe. If these animals are sentient, the growing decapod production industry likely poses serious welfare concerns for these animals.
• Information about the number of decapods used for food is needed to better assess the scale of this problem and the expected value of helping these animals.
• In this work we estimated the number of shrimp and prawns farmed and killed in a year, given that they seem to be the vast majority of decapods used in the food system.
• We estimated that around:
  • 440 billion (90% subjective confidence interval [SCI]: 300 billion – 620 billion) farmed shrimp are killed per year, which vastly exceeds the figure of the most numerous farmed vertebrates used for food production–namely, fishes and chickens.
  • 230 billion (90% SCI: 150 billion – 370 billion) shrimp are alive on farms at any moment, which surpasses any farmed animal estimate known to date, including farmed insect numbers.
  • 25 trillion (90% SCI: 6.5 trillion – 66 trillion<a href=\"#fnref2\">2) wild shrimp are directly slaughtered annually, a figure that represents the vast majority of all animals directly killed by humans out of which food is produced.<a href=\"#fnref3\">3
• At this moment, the problem of shrimp production is greater in scale–i.e., number of individuals affected–than the problem of insect farming, fish captures, or the farming of any vertebrate for human consumption. Thus, while the case for <a href=\"#introduction\">shrimp sentience is weaker than that for vertebrates and other decapods, the expected value of helping shrimp and prawns might be higher than the expected value of helping other animals.