Why shrimp deserve compassion too
They may be ugly and unappealing, but shrimp – farmed in vast quantities in squalid conditions – deserve ethical consideration, says Phoebe Arslanagic-Little
I can buy a box of supermarket eggs for 15p an egg. Instead, I have a crate of eggs couriered to me, once a month, from a farm in Lancashire called Oakstream Pastures. This costs me 77p an egg, which is 513 per cent more expensive on a per-egg basis than those that I can easily pick up at Tesco. I am also certain that they taste identical to the supermarket eggs. No doubt you think I’m a mug.
But I’m very happy to pay the mug’s price because these eggs are laid by birds living in a sort of hen paradise. These chickens, gambolling around in Lancashire pastures, might have a quality of life that rivals your own. Each hen gets 50m2 of space to herself, more than what a human living in the average one bed flat in London has. I am tempted to swing by the farm some time, like an Ofsted inspector but perhaps unannounced, and make sure the hens really are happy.
Chickens, unlike cats or dogs, are fairly low charisma and perhaps even a little evil looking. Film maker Werner Herzog once said: “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity”. The failure of chickens as a species to charm human beings like Werner Herzog might be the principal reason that they live in as poor conditions as they frequently do.
Werner Herzog once said: ‘Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity’
Shrimp, an astonishingly unappealing creature, have it considerably worse than chickens: 440bn shrimp are farmed each year, which is five times the total number of farmed land animals. I have no wish to detail the brutal horrors visited upon farmed shrimp, but they are easy enough to look up.
The people of the Shrimp Welfare Project energetically travel the world trying to improve the lives and deaths of farmed shrimp. They provide shrimp farmers with humane killing methods like stunners and advise them on how to make life better for their animals. They persuade supermarkets to commit to only selling shrimp that have been killed humanely. The Shrimp Welfare Project say that for every dollar you donate to them, you improve the lives of 1,500 shrimp per year. In 2023, they received a £2m dollar grant from Open Philanthropy.
Is hurting shrimp immoral?
There is vigorous online debate over whether or not charitable action like this is a good idea. Some people argue that expending such effort on shrimp welfare is nothing less than a very serious waste of money. Really, shrimp? The marine insect-looking things with eye stalks and ten legs? Studies suggest they do not even feel pain.
I understand this reaction. Despite being a vegan for over a decade (until I started eating those expensive eggs), I am not particularly fond of animals. It is true that I am generally in favour of cats and very occasionally, I meet a dog I like. But shrimp really are a stretch.
Yet if you think that hurting a shrimp is at all immoral – which can be true even if you think it much less immoral than hurting a puppy – then it is obviously bad that more shrimp than the human population of America times a thousand are dying agonising deaths every year.
Being an ethical consumer can be an expensive and burdensome business. You may well feel that you are already doing your bit by eating fairtrade chocolate, choosing the vegan sausage roll at Greggs, and feeling very guilty every time you order something from Amazon.
But perhaps there is still space in your heart for shrimp. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S and Ocado all partner with the Shrimp Welfare Project, which makes things straightforward. And we should feel very grateful that the Shrimp Welfare Project are out there, working hard to make life better for the poor charmless shrimp, caring about these unlikeable creatures so that we don’t have to.
Phoebe Arslanagic-Little is a columnist at City AM and head of the New Deal for Parents at Onward