International Shrimp Welfare Day

A proclamation.

It’s Shrimp Welfare Day here on Substack!

This impromptu holiday was occasioned by an article from Bentham’s Bulldog soliciting donations for the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), a charity that promotes less painful slaughter methods for farmed shrimp and secures commitments from corporations to stop sourcing shrimp whose eyes are crushed to promote fertility. Bentham’s piece was followed up by posts from Richard Hanania, Amos Wollen, and Maxim Lott, who collectively gave over $2,000 to SWP. I suspect I’m at least partly responsible for today’s happenings, since I wrote an article making the case for (proverbially) dumping money into the ocean just under a month ago.

The Case for Dumping Money Into the Ocean

Appropriately, today is also National Philanthropy Day in the United States. In light of this happy coincidence, I propose that Substackers use this day — November 15 — each year to promote a highly underrated charity that would benefit from diversifying its funding streams and attracting more small-dollar donors. Unless there’s a sea change (see what I did there?) in farmed animal funding over the next few years, I expect SWP to continue to fit these criteria. Therefore, by the power vested in me by Substack, Peter Singer, and God, I do hereby declare that for the foreseeable future, November 15 will be known as “International Shrimp Welfare Day.”

ISWD should be marked each year with a thoughtful appeal by each participating blogger for the author’s preferred shrimp charity (in addition to SWP, there’s also Crustacean Compassion and the Aquatic Life Institute) including a call for donations and proof that the author gives the charity their own money. I set up a recurring donation to SWP a while ago and never deleted the confirmation email, so I’ve included the screenshot below.

As Bentham has already pointed out, donating to shrimp welfare can help avert an extraordinary amount of suffering. SWP estimates it can reduce the suffering of 1,500 farmed shrimp per dollar per year, and our best estimates of animal capabilities suggest that shrimp suffer at least 3.1% as intensely as human beings. (If you think that’s too high, keep an open mind and consider what it might be like to be a shrimp. As I’ve mentioned before, Richard Dawkins has pointed out that simpler organisms may actually suffer more intensely than larger organisms relative to their neuron count because they’re less capable of learning from experiences and may need stronger pain stimuli to understand what behaviors promote survival and reproduction.)

This means that one dollar given to SWP “prevents as much agony as anesthetizing 46.5 humans before they slowly suffocate to death at low temperatures, per year!” Even if you think that’s too large by two or three orders of magnitude, that’s still the equivalent of spending no more than $20 to spare someone from suffering an excruciating death.

If you’re a Substack writer, then in addition to donating to SWP yourself, you can do even more good by asking other people to donate as well. A few months ago, one evaluator estimated that the organization Giving What We Can (GWWC), which encourages people to take a pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, can raise an average of $13 for its top charities for every marginal dollar that it spends. If you’re a Substack writer and you’re just as cost-effective as GWWC, that means you can help almost 20,000 shrimp for every dollar of labor that you put into writing a fundraising post. (In turn, someone like me who encourages other people to encourage other people to donate money might plausibly be estimated to help 260,000 shrimp per dollar of labor.)

Of course, the precise numbers don’t matter. If these estimates are too large by even several orders of magnitude, it’s still worth it to help out the shrimp whether you’re a reader or a blogger. If you’d like to set up a recurring donation to SWP, you can do so here. If you’d like to participate or help me organize ISWD 2025, please send me a DM.

---