“Contra Shrimp Welfare.” by Kristaps Zilgalvis

It is likely that installing a shrimp stunner reduces global suffering as much as making the carts in a single Walmart less squeaky for 20 minutes a year. Or perhaps not at all.

Open Philanthropy has handed $2 million to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), primarily to promote electrical stunning devices, and fund staff to push policy changes. Each stunner costs $70,000 to purchase and $50,000 to distribute. The goal? To "reduce suffering" when 500 million shrimp are harvested annually by cutting their death time from 20 minutes in ice slurry to 30 seconds via electrical stunning.

This initiative may sound odd at first glance but the SWP has produced numerous blog posts, elaborate spreadsheets, and lengthy PDFs to justify their approach. They have clearly thought this through extensively, and I will look to provide a short, but equivalently thorough rebuttal.

They claim that the shrimp stunner renders shrimp [...]

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MvjYziFxYj7oHbCJe/contra-shrimp-welfare

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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