Becoming Shrimp-Pilled

“If sentience is what matters…humans are not the center of the moral universe.”

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

Matthew Adelstein is a 21-year-old undergraduate studying Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He also writes the blog Bentham’s Bulldog.

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When I was young, to the extent that my attitude toward animals was unusual in any respect, it was with regards to its callousness. I did not like animals, and I did not think much about their interests. On the single occasion I remember thinking about animal welfare, I instinctively assumed that the animals we eat aren’t conscious or are only minimally conscious, and then I did not pay the topic another thought. The me of that time would have been quite shocked to learn that I would later become a big advocate for any sort of animal welfare — and shrimp welfare most of all. But so it goes.

This concern for the welfare of the neglected quintillions of small, simple, invertebrate animals began with more general concern for animals. Around when I entered tenth grade, I began reading seriously about the conditions on factory farms. While I’d previously assumed that most animals have lives worth living — and that we did them a mercy by creating them to eat them — a brief encounter with the details of the factory farm rid me of that fanciful notion.

Animals are confined, mutilated, locked in a cage, and forced to live in filth and feces. Chickens are kept in a cage too small to turn around in. Male chicks in the egg industry are ground up on their first day of life — by the billions — because they can’t lay eggs. Pigs are kept in small, confined spaces where they can express none of their natural behaviors before they are gassed to death. Injuries are routine. Most chickens break bones multiple times in their few short weeks of life. The people who constructed the modern factory farm have come as close as anyone towards building hell on Earth.

Reading about the factory farms — the gassing, the confinement, the routine physical abuse — is like reading about something out of a horror movie. I mean that in quite a literal sense. If one merely heard about some of the practices on factory farms — say, having low-paid, largely migrant workers inject male turkey semen into female turkeys — one would not be sure about whether it was something from a horror movie or a real practice on a factory farm. If a person treated a dog the way we treat hundreds of billions of cows, pigs, and chickens, we would not hesitate to call that torture. If the laws were enforced consistently, running a factory farm would be totally illegal due to laws against animal cruelty — not to mention laws against bestiality.

Some experiences are very bad indeed. It is bad to experience being set on fire. It is bad to be in pain and good to be happy. We all accept this, readily enough, in the context of people. But it turns out there is ample reason to think that nearly all the experience in the world — nearly all the pleasures and pains, misery and joy — are not experienced by humans. Though humans are the sentient beings we think about the most, we are but a tiny sliver of overall sentient beings. If sentience is what matters, if hurting is a bad thing regardless of one’s species, then factory farms are very bad, and humans are not the center of the moral universe.

Why think that sentient beings matter even if they are not human? Well, lots of things matter in a human’s life. Yet when one reflects on those things, the fact that they matter doesn’t seem to have much to do with our species. When you are in great pain, the badness of it doesn’t have to do with the fact that you are biologically a Homo sapien. It has to do with the fact that it hurts. A painkiller would be of great comfort; in contrast, a pill that made you no longer a Homo sapien, without affecting the quality of your agony, would not.

If there are other beings who feel pain like us, their species seems to us completely morally irrelevant. Perhaps that is because the otherness of their species diminishes their capacity to experience certain goods. A pig cannot read philosophy. But if a pig can hurt and be unhappy, then its joys and happiness matter just as ours do. Even if it has fewer total interests, its interests count as ours do. And even if they count less, so long as they count at all — so long as excruciating pain is bad even if the sufferer isn’t biologically human — animals matter a great deal.

And here I have only mentioned a few select facts. I haven’t even discussed animals’ near complete inability to sleep on factory farms, due both to confinement and cruel, artificial lighting. Nor have I mentioned the mass-starvation inflicted on egg-laying hens in an effort to get them to lay more eggs, nor the fact that every year we boil alive about a million birds (take a moment to think about what such an experience would be like), nor have I mentioned a hundred other similar practices of pitiless cruelty.

After learning about this, I did the natural thing: I went vegan. It seems obvious, if one regards factory farms as wicked tools of evil, that one would refuse to give them money in exchange for their services.

More animals are killed every year in the meat industry than the number of people who have ever lived. Nearly all of these animals underwent a life and death of unspeakable cruelty. To the extent that we really mean it when we say we oppose animal cruelty, we must oppose the factory farm, which may as well be the definition of animal cruelty — and the source, every few years, of more suffering than all the suffering in human history.

Opposing factory farming is relatively easy and obvious-seeming. While few actively avoid meat from factory farms, one who has witnessed what occurs within their walls is almost inevitably hit with a wave of revulsion and nausea. The animals that are beaten and savaged, ripped from their parents and gassed, behave like helpless dogs. And anyone with sense recognizes that, were we to do such monstrous things to dogs, this would be gravely wicked.

I was particularly convinced by an argument from the philosopher Michael Huemer. Huemer argues in his book Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism that it is wrong to cause others lots of suffering for the sake of comparatively minor personal benefit. This seems like a pretty obvious ethical principle. But if it’s right, then typical meat-consumption is almost surely wrong.

By eating meat, one consigns animals to days or weeks of suffering for the sake of comparatively minor pleasure. If pain is a bad thing — as anyone who has experienced it knows it to be — we shouldn’t cause lots of it for trivial reasons. Given that we do cause lots of it each time we eat meat, we should cease to consume it immediately. We should stop funding the institutions that torture staggeringly large numbers of animals. And if one can prevent lots of bad effects from happening at minimal cost, then they should donate to charities that spare animals from years of intense suffering.

I was never particularly moved by sentimentality toward animals. As mentioned before, I do not think I am unusually emotionally moved by their plight. While I sometimes feel upset or disturbed watching footage from factory farms, so do a lot of other people. What moved me was thinking about the arguments against meat consumption. While meat consumption is normalized, when one reflects on it, it seems obviously wicked — it’s almost like the paradigm case of wickedness, for it involves hurting the weak, innocent, and vulnerable for trivial reasons. I am not unusually moved by emotional reactions, but I think I am unusually moved by arguments. Arguments have convinced me to give lots of money to charity. I’ve been convinced that the future is the primary determinant of how good the present is.

It is easy to see what is wrong with how we treat the larger, more charismatic animals. They naturally arouse our sympathy. They look like creatures that matter rather than weird aliens. But this is not so for shrimp. It would be a long time after I first committed to animal welfare before I thought shrimp mattered.

Now as someone who was, at the time, a big animal welfare guy, I did think shrimp mattered a good deal. I had vaguely heard that the number of shrimp that are farmed is staggeringly large, and it seemed the logic that applied to the rest of the animals carried over to shrimp. If it is wrong to torture a pig, a chicken, and a fish, presumably the same holds for a shrimp. It would be one thing if we had strong arguments against shrimp sentience, but I wasn’t aware of any such arguments.

I first became seriously invested in shrimp welfare at a conference. I heard from another attendee — the philosopher Dustin Crummett — that the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) spares around 1,500 shrimp from an excruciatingly painful death per dollar it raises. Now, as it happens, Dustin was wrong — it spares 1,500 shrimp per dollar it raises every single year, which means the SWP is probably about ten times more effective than Crummett suggested. The money SWP raises is spent on stunners, which can be reused year after year. Each year they spare thousands of shrimp from intense agony.

Immediately, it seemed very obvious that giving to the SWP was very important — thousands were saved from slow torture for just a dollar! If you could prevent 15,000 lobsters from being slowly boiled in a pot for just a single dollar — hundreds per penny — that would seem like an excellent use of a dollar. From the time I first heard about the unfathomable effectiveness of the SWP, I was convinced it was an extremely good place to give money.

Further investigation only strengthened my conviction. I learned the animals often freeze and suffocate, slowly, over the course of many minutes. I learned that shrimp respond to painkillers and nurse their wounds. I learned that decapods, the animal group shrimp belong to, demonstrate surprisingly complex behavior and meet many behavioral indicators of being in pain. I learned that the most detailed report ever done on shrimp sentience had a mean estimate of shrimp pain being 19% as intense as ours — meaning that every dollar given to the SWP prevents as much agony as sparing around 3,000 people from a painful death. Now, while you shouldn’t take that estimate as gospel, it seems like a reasonably good estimate and by far the best one done so far.

I similarly learned that 440 billion farmed shrimp are killed every year, and the number of annually slaughtered wild-caught shrimp number in the trillions. About 110 billion people have ever lived. This means that four times more shrimp are farmed in nightmarish conditions where about half die before they are slaughtered than humans who have ever lived. If shrimp can suffer, then shrimp farms are the source of unfathomable quantities of suffering. It may very well be that on shrimp farms, every few years, there is more total agony than all the agony in human history.

It is one thing to inflict lots of suffering on others for very serious moral reasons. If we had to torture shrimp to save humanity from destruction, that would be one thing. But this is not, of course, why we do it. We do it so we can eat them cheaply. This seems like a rather poor reason to potentially cause more suffering than all the suffering in human history. If suffering is a bad thing, we will need a stronger reason to cause so much of it.

It is true, of course, that there are a great many things about helping humans that do not carry over to shrimp. Humans can experience love, relationships, courage, and so on. Shrimp can experience none of these. But if shrimp can feel pain — which it seems plausible they can — then we have good reason to help them. It is bad to be in excruciating agony. When one is in the throes of extreme agony, they recognize, correctly, that it is bad because of how it feels, not because of anything about man’s higher capacities. In light of this, if shrimp can feel intense pain, then they matter, just as we do. Their pain is bad and it should be prevented. None of the differences between us and shrimp render them morally irrelevant when shrimp experience horrific pain.

Consider, for instance, the practice on shrimp farms of crushing the shrimps’ eyes. This is done because shrimp with crushed eyes are more fertile. If someone crushed my eyes tomorrow, it would create a host of problems. Partly it would be bad because it would blind me, leaving me unable to do a great many valuable things (like writing blog posts about shrimp welfare). But part of the reason it would be bad is that having one’s eyes crushed is no doubt extremely unpleasant. If shrimp can experience similar acute unpleasantness, then we should try to avoid hurting them.

Now, convincing people that shrimp matter is difficult. Shrimp welfare being important is relatively counterintuitive. But if human history has taught us one lesson, it is that our moral intuitions are often ill-calibrated for dealing with those who are different from us. For much of history, people believed conquering and pillaging other lands was permissible. How much greater should we expect our error to be when we make decisions considering small, alien, aquatic arthropods? How much more should we expect our empathy to be deficient?

I am sometimes asked why I was more ready to embrace shrimp welfare than others tend to be. I do not have a very good answer. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that people are more ready to embrace shrimp welfare than is commonly expected. For example, The Daily Show has covered the topic of shrimp welfare. They devoted an entire segment to praising it! I have probably raised more money through my articles for the shrimp than I have for people.

The Shrimp Welfare Project was created to reduce suffering as effectively as possible. The cofounders, Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla and Aaron Boddy, discovered that it was very cheap to help shrimp. The project does many things to benefit shrimp, but probably their most significant project is providing stunners, so that shrimp are afforded painless deaths, rather than slowly freezing and suffocating to death. On a budget of just a few hundred thousand dollars per year, they have improved the welfare of around 4.5 billion shrimp in expectation per year (meaning that even if they stopped operating tomorrow, an extra 4.5 billion shrimp would continue to benefit each year). This tiny group has significantly benefitted more shrimp than there are people on Earth!

While a great many people say that shrimp welfare is ridiculous and unpopular and that it’s impossible to convince people of its importance, I have yet to see evidence of this. When I first wrote about shrimp welfare, many people gave money to the SWP. Several different philosophers wrote favorably about the issue. Certainly it seems a little bit odd to most people, but few seem actively hostile to the idea. When you explain to a person that one can prevent many shrimp from being painfully tortured for just a single dollar, spending this dollar doesn’t seem crazy to many people.

In opposing shrimp farming, one has — as is also the case with opposition to factory farming — the gift of extremely ghastly opponents. The shrimp farms contain extremely grotesque welfare violations. If someone did to their pet shrimp what the shrimp farms do routinely, we would fear for that person’s soul.There is, of course, the common practice of crushing their eyes, which I have already mentioned. Then there is the fact that about half of farmed shrimp die before slaughter, meaning that being a shrimp in a farm for a few months is twice as dangerous as being a Cambodian during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Imagine how bad conditions have to be to kill off half a population in just a few months. Why is it so dangerous to be a farmed shrimp? It’s because almost everything that can go wrong does. Disease is common (in part because the corpses of dead shrimp often remain in the tank for quite a while). Water quality is poor. Temperatures are often quite unpleasant for the poor shrimp.

One of the worst things about shrimp farms is the absence of dissolved oxygen. Dissolved oxygen is how shrimp breathe. Its absence causes a range of deleterious health effects and is quite bad for shrimp welfare. It would be a bit like if, at every moment, you were smothered by a pillow, desperately struggling to breathe. This might be the worst thing the shrimp undergo, though it’s a neglected welfare concern because it’s hard to get humans to sympathize with the absence of dissolved oxygen.

Since becoming convinced that shrimp matter, I have changed my mind on a great many issues. But I have not wavered on the core conviction that it is bad that staggeringly large numbers of beings are pointlessly tortured to death,and that it would be best if we all attempted to stop it from going on.

This is a seemingly radical and crazy position. But seemingly radical and crazy positions are often correct. For much of human history, democracy was an extreme and far-fetched idea. So was the abolition of slavery. And this is exactly the sort of radical position we might expect to be correct — the one that might be neglected because of humans’ drought of compassion toward those who are different from us. Even if shrimp mattered, it would be unsurprising that most people wouldn’t care about them. So the fact that people mostly don’t care about them isn’t strong evidence against the fact that they matter. If you’re expected to be blind towards something, then you shouldn’t update on not seeing it.

Here is another reason I think shrimp matter: it is hard to see what criteria would make them morally unimportant that wouldn’t be an overgeneralization. What can the opponent of shrimp welfare say as for why shrimp don’t matter when people do? Here is one common answer, which I heard from someone just last week: “Shrimp are food. We eat them! So they do not matter.”

But now let’s test this principle. Imagine there were humans whom we had decided to eat. Would that thereby excuse any manner of misconduct against them? Of course not! So the mere fact that we planned to eat them, that we raised them for food, cannot be an adequate excuse for their mistreatment.

Another common explanation for the irrelevance of shrimp is that they are very stupid creatures. The dumbest person you’ve ever met is smarter than any shrimp. So, one might say, perhaps creatures with such profound, breathtaking stupidity cannot be all that morally important. But this, once again, cannot be an adequate explanation. For if we came across a human who was profoundly cognitively impaired, even to the level of a shrimp, we would not find it morally permissible to stab out her eyes, constantly leave her barely able to breathe, and then suffocate her to death on a sheet of ice. Mere unintelligence cannot be a blanket license for wanton mistreatment.

A third common explanation for shrimps’ unimportance is that shrimp as a species — not just as individuals — are profoundly unintelligent. And yet if we learned that some of the mentally disabled were not biologically human but were members of an unintelligent species instead, presumably this would not grant us license to leave them to suffocate on ice. So this also does not justify the mistreatment of shrimp.

Let me be clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that humans matter the same amount as shrimp. I am not saying that we are the same as shrimp. Rather, I am saying that there is nothing about shrimp that justifies the kinds of wicked things we do to them routinely. Remember, we horrifically mistreat about 440 billion shrimp every year. If shrimp matter even a little bit, if it is even slightly tragic when they experience pain potentially of a kind you or I could scarcely imagine, then something extremely dreadful is occurring with shrimp farms. Shrimp are so numerous that if they matter at all, shrimp welfare is a seriously urgent crime.

We underestimate this issue, I suspect, because of our distorted intuitions about size. Humans suffer from a bias called scope neglect — people will pay as much to save 2,000 birds as 200,000 of them. For this reason, what hope do we have of grasping the sheer wretchedness of the merciless and systematic torment being inflicted on these beings that are not like us? What hope do we have of saving them when we feel no natural empathy for them? When our intuitions are innumerate and so would treat 440 billion instances of shrimp torture the same as they would one billion instances of shrimp torture, even though the former is several hundred times worse?

But at some point, the right course of action, when one’s intuitions are screwed up, is to ignore them. Suffering is bad. If we cannot feel sympathy toward shrimp — if we cannot even manufacture sympathy for them — then we should act as though we feel sympathy for them. We should give money to organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project, which, remember, spare about 15,000 shrimp from extreme suffering per dollar they receive.

I realize this has not been a very interesting story. I never had a road to Damascus moment. No celestial shrimp ever appeared to me in a vision (though I did once see a cloud that looked like a shrimp as I was thinking through how to balance writing and thinking about the philosophy of religion and effective altruist cause areas). Rather, I became a shrimp advocate for the same reason one becomes an advocate of anything: I was convinced by an argument.