A Very Simple Case For Giving To Shrimp

Crossposted from my blog. 

(I think this is an important article, so I’d really appreciate you sharing and restacking it—especially with people who are very rich).

I’ve elsewhere written more words about why you should give to shrimp welfare than are contained in a typical Andy Masley post (which, by conservative estimates, is at least 10 billion). I’ve talked about what makes pain bad. I’ve done rough Fermi calculations of the amount of agony averted. But here I’m going to try a different tack. I think people probably already care about shrimp enough that they should give to shrimp welfare.

Imagine that you discovered that there were 150 lobsters about to be boiled alive. There’s a machine designed to anesthetize them—so that they don’t have to struggle and writhe in agony for many minutes. Sadly, the machine is broken. To fix it, you would have to spend one single penny.

Question: is that a good use of a penny?

The obvious answer is yes! It’s worth spending a single penny so that 150 lobsters don’t have to experience painful deaths. But lobsters are no more important than shrimp and the Shrimp Welfare Project can anesthetize 150 shrimp before death per penny they receive (by purchasing stunners which stun thousands of animals per dollar raised). So if you think that it’s worth spending a penny to anesthetize 150 lobsters so they don’t have to experience being boiled alive, you should also support funding the Shrimp Welfare Project.

If you had the opportunity to keep doing this over and over again—to have each penny that you give stop 150 lobsters from experiencing the pain of being boiled—that would be even better. So similarly, you should give some money to shrimp welfare! If you give, say, 1,000 dollars, you can prevent ~15 million shrimp from experiencing extreme agony!

Consider another case: suppose that there were 100 shrimp suffocating to death in a bucket. You could put them back into the water, but doing so would take about a minute of your time. Assume that they’d be killed in a few minutes if they went back into the water, but you’d spare them from painful and slow suffocation. Question: should you spend that minute?

If the answer is yes, then I think you should donate to shrimp welfare.

Let’s assume you value your time at 15 dollars an hour, being fairly conservative. This means that you value each minute of your time at 25 cents. So you’re willing to spend the equivalent in time of 25 cents helping 100 shrimp. But if you give to shrimp welfare, every single cent helps more than a hundred shrimp. Giving to shrimp welfare is ~40 times more efficient than moving the shrimp back into the water so that they don’t suffocate en masse. So if you would take a minute saving a hundred shrimp from slow suffocation, then you should give some money to the Shrimp Welfare Project.

Lots of the critics of shrimp welfare act like the idea that you should give to shrimp is crazy and extreme. But it’s really not. The position is simply: 150 agonizing shrimp deaths are important enough that it’s worth spending one penny to avert them. If you think that, if you believe that utterly modest thesis, you should give to shrimp welfare!

I think lots of radical and extreme things. But my belief that 150 shrimp slowly suffocating to death is bad enough that it’s worth spending one penny to avert isn’t one of those extreme beliefs. It’s about as obvious as positions get. It is critics of shrimp welfare who are extreme. The stated position of Lyman Stone, the main substack shrimp critic, is “You can kill millions of them however you want and it's fine.” The pro-shrimp people are the ones following common sense, rather than sanctioning pointless cruelty and suffering.

I was reminded of just how moderate this position is when I read this hilarious paragraph from an article covering recent shrimp protests:

Organised by the International Council for Animal Welfare, the protesters called on Iceland to end the practice of cutting prawns’ eyes off and suffocating them to death.

Um, sounds like a pretty reasonable ask. I think most people would think we should stop cutting off prawns’ eyes and suffocating them to death. When a recent Reddit thread went viral about eyestalk ablation, the common reaction was “wait, wtf, we’re cutting out shrimp’s eyes to boost their fertility???” The shrimp welfare advocates aren’t crazy extremists—we’re just the people who think we should stop cutting off prawns’ eyes and suffocating them to death without stunning them first.

If you agree with this goal, if you agree we shouldn’t torture animals unnecessarily, then I’d encourage you to give some money to the Shrimp Welfare Project. If you give even a hundred dollars, you’ll affect more shrimp than there are people in Montana.