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Shrimp Welfare Project - Special Program

Not fundedGrant
$0raised

Project summary

Shrimp Welfare Project is an organisation of people who believe that shrimps are capable of suffering and deserve our moral consideration [1]. We aim to cost-effectively reduce the suffering of billions of shrimps and envision a world where shrimps don't suffer needlessly.

  • Programme: our current most impactful intervention is to place electrical stunners with producers ($60k/stunner): We have signed agreements with 2 producers willing and able to use electrical stunning technology as part of their slaughter process which will materially reduce the acute suffering at the last few minutes / hours of shrimps lives. Collectively, these 2 agreements will impact more than half a billion animals per year at a rate of more than 4,000 shrimps/dollar/annum. Please take a look at our blog post on the first agreement here

  • We are in advanced negotiations with 2 more producers which would take the number of animals to more than 1 billion shrimps per annum.

  • See our back-of-the-envelope calculation for the number of shrimps and cost-effectiveness analysis here

Project goals

  • Simplified end-game of this programme: the interim goal of placing these stunners with selected producers in different contexts/systems is to remove some perceived obstacles to the industry and show major retailers and other shrimp buyers that electrical stunning is something they can demand from their supply chain 

  • The ultimate goal is for electrical stunning to be:

    • widely adopted by medium to large shrimp producers in their slaughter process (pushed by their buyers), 

    • included by certifiers in their standards, and eventually

    • considered (eventually) to be an obvious requirement by legislators when drafting policy (e.g. EU review of decapod welfare in 2028-2030)

How will this funding be used?

  • Room for more funding: Our 2023 general budget is fully funded so any additional money would go to this programme. We believe we can place 3 stunners during 2023 which would mean a potential to use an additional $180k at an extremely cost-effective rate of >2,000 animals helped per dollar per year.

  • During 2024, we estimate we could place up to 12 stunners ($60x12 = $720k)

How could this project be actively harmful?

  • London School of Economics report [2] - Only had “medium confidence” that electrical stunning renders decapods unconscious (although “no confidence” for ice slurry which is the current slaughter method).

  • The “Weineck” study [3] - The only published academic study on the electrical stunning of shrimps only stunned a single shrimp at a time

  • Tesco/Hilton case study [4] - ~2% of shrimps continued to demonstrate heart and gill bailer activity after electrical stunning

  • University of Stirling study [5] - To address these uncertainties, Open Philantropy is funding a study to optimise electrical stunning parameters for shrimps

What other funding is this person or project getting?

  • Open Philanthropy and the EA Animal Welfare Fund are funding our operations roughly at 60/40, respectively. 

  • We are attempting to fundraise for the stunner programme independently from our two main funders as we have been advised by them that we should diversify our funding pool

andresjz avatar

Thank you all for your support to SWP!

Rachel avatar

Rachel Weinberg

over 1 year ago

There's a cost-effectiveness analysis of this project on the EA Forum!

MarcusAbramovitch avatar

Marcus Abramovitch

over 1 year ago

Main points in favor of this grant

Extremely cost effective impacting 4000 shrimp/dollar/annum.

The sheer number of shrimp that are farmed are very high and their welfare range is ~3% that of humans.
Andres is very smart, reasonable, pragmatic caring and data-driven.

I think it's very important to scale up charities that have demonstrated very strong impact and cost-effectiveness. Currently, on the margin, too much money is going to seeding new charities since people seem to have this desire to be "the reason" that a charity exists. Many charities fail and have little impact. This is fine. But the point of seeding charities was to scale up the ones that do really well. I'm hoping to see more of this.

Donor's main reservations

I think there's a chance that shrimp aren't sentient (can't feel pain) and thus stunning shrimp vs suffocation are immaterial. I think this is dominated by the magnitude of shrimp farmed and killed every year.

Process for deciding amount

The money I was given to regrant is intended to be used for "longtermist" purposes and it isn't right to use the money given with specific intentions for other purposes. A $1 grant to get the project on the board that I will donate to later seems good as well as showing the opportunity to others.

Conflicts of interest

None