EA - Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production by Rethink Priorities

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production, published by Rethink Priorities on September 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Citation: Romero Waldhorn, D., & Autric, E. (2022, December 21). Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production.SummaryDecapod crustaceans or, for short, decapods (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) 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.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 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.IntroductionRecently, Birch et al. (2021) and Crump et al. (2022a) reviewed the evidence of sentience in decapod crustaceans, with a focus on pain experience. Similar to findings previously reported by Waldhorn (2019; see also Waldhorn et al., 2020), these studies concluded that there is substantial, although limited, evidence that decapods might be sentient. Notably, the low strength of current evidence likely corresponds to the little scientific attention various decapod taxa have received-which is particularly the case for shrimp, especially for those belonging to the Penaeidae family (see also Comstock, 2022).Decapods like crabs, lobsters, and shrimp serve as a major source of human food worldwide, having partly driven the global growth of the aquaculture sector in recent years (de Jong, 2018). Decapod production also represents the fastest-growing major fishery activity worldwide (Boenish et al., 2022). If these animals are sentient, current commercial practices pose serious welfare risks both when decapods are farmed and/or handled during capture, transport and sale, and when they are slaughtered (see Birch et al., 2021 and Crump et al., 2022b). These welfare issues might be particularly pressing given the high numbers of farmed decapods (see Mood & Brooke, 2019a), plus other uncounted individuals captured from the wild.Furthermore, increasing human population, changes in consumer preferences, technological advancements, and income growth suggest that decapod production stands to increase in the future (Boenish et al., 2022; FAO, 2022f), which may, in turn, augment the scale of the problem of decapod welfare.Currently, only partial data exists about the scope of this issue. Mood & Brooke (2019a) calculated that between 255 billion and 605 billion decapods are farmed every year, the great majority of such individual...