You Can Be Part of the World's Largest Grassroots Shrimp Fundraiser

Yes, YOU — no, not the guy in front of you — YOU, the person with the furrowed brow, pointing at yourself and mouthing “me?” — YOU can fundraise for shrimps!

For the month of May, I’ve been a temporarily embarrassed blogger. In the past three weeks, I’ve written scarcely over 9,000 words while devoting much of my faculties to the far less taxing pursuit of training to run 13.1 miles at a time again now that winter is over (that’s 21.1 so-called kilometers for you communists and Europoors that use the metric system). Nevertheless, because my articles are such timeless classics, I’ve managed to attract dozens of new subscribers to these United States of Exception.

While I was away, a friend of a friend of the blog — Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla of the Shrimp Welfare Project — made his television debut on The Daily Show with Ronny Chieng. If the point of the appearance was to raise mainstream awareness and get some non-negligible part of the audience to think about supporting or donating to SWP, it appears to have been a remarkable success. When I search the exact phrase “shrimp welfare” on YouTube and organize results by view count, the Daily Show clip is #1 with nearly 500,000 views, while #2 is a two-year-old Spanish-language interview by a vegan channel with just over 1,600 views. The comment section on the Daily Show clip also appears unusually positive and enthusiastic for shrimp welfare.¹

If you want to know whose moral ledger to credit for exposing such a large mainstream audience to shrimp welfare, look no further than local Substacker and friend of the blog Bentham's Bulldog. Apparently, the showrunners decided to contact Zorrilla only after learning about SWP through one of Bentham’s articles. Perversely, you might also have to give a share of the credit to the inveterate invertebrate hater Lyman Stone, as there’s a non-zero chance the article they saw was Bentham’s epic reply to Lyman, “Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb About Shrimp.”

Coincidentally, the Daily Show segment aired exactly six months to the day after Bentham and a few other Substackers — mostly not me — raised at least $15,731 in one-time donations to SWP, plus at least $414 per month in recurring donations. Over the course of a year, that’s around 2% of the organization’s budget, or more than one-third of the cost of a single stunner that can render hundreds of millions of shrimps unconscious before they’re slaughtered. According to a highly uncertain yet conservative estimate of SWP’s cost-effectiveness, the money donated just in the first year will probably avert a painful death for between 22.8 million and 43.5 million shrimps per year.

That’s an extraordinary amount of good. Shrimps show evidence of anxiety-like behavior. When injured, they engage in grooming. When given analgesics, this behavior is reduced. According to a review commissioned by the British government, shrimp sentience is a likely possibility. Conditional on shrimp sentience (p = 0.37, 90% CI: 0.20, 0.70), shrimps likely suffer no more than two orders of magnitude less than human beings, according to the most thorough report to date on the comparative moral weight of animal experiences. That means every $1 donated to SWP likely averts as much suffering in expectation per year as anesthetizing between 7 and 279 human beings instead of allowing them to experience a painful death. The $20,000 we raised last year is akin to anesthetizing the population of an entire mid- to large-size American city.

Still, there’s a lot more to be done to improve shrimp welfare across the industry. At any moment, there are hundreds of billions of shrimps being farmed worldwide, most of them confined at extreme stocking densities in poor quality water and destined to be slaughtered in excruciating ice slurry while still conscious. Typically, around 50% of farmed shrimps don’t even survive to slaughter age. It’s not unreasonable to think the total amount of farmed shrimp suffering that occurs each year is greater in expectation than the suffering of every human being on Earth.

Last year, I said I would organize an annual shrimp welfare fundraiser on Substack, and I intend on keeping my word. Yes, you heard me: International Shrimp Welfare Day is a go, and I want YOU to participate. (Actually, it may end up taking place over the course of a week, so we’ll see about the name.) Basically, I want to recreate the success of the impromptu fundraiser we had in November, just with better organization and a wider reach. The folks at FarmKind have reached out to help create some cool web features so each participant knows exactly how much they raise.

• What do you need to do? If you’re a writer, complete this Google Form to let me know you’re participating. Then, I’ll follow up with any necessary information closer to the date of the fundraiser (which should be no earlier than November 15th and no later than the end of December). Other than that, just publish a Substack post during the fundraising period and include a custom FarmKind donation link I’ll be sending you ahead of time. (And if you’re not a writer, you can donate to SWP by following the link here.)

• What do you get? Besides knowing that you’re helping millions of shrimps, I’ll promote your shrimp welfare article through my newsletter and cross-post it if it’s one of my favorites. I’ll also be donating $50 to SWP in the name of whichever blogger raises the most money, another $50 in the name of whoever raises the most relative to their subscriber count (as long as you have 100+ subscribers), and $100 in the name of whoever makes the novelest contribution to the case for shrimp welfare. (For example, if you can convincingly argue that Robert Nozick would have been a shrimp welfarist — or, more likely, even more radical — then the money is as good as yours.)

• What exactly are we raising money for? You can see SWP’s latest funding proposal here and here. With the next $50,000 to $1,000,000, they plan on scaling up the so-called Humane Slaughter Initiative, which means buying more stunners for shrimp producers, obtaining more commitments from retailers not to source shrimps killed in ice slurry, developing new stunner technology (especially for smaller producers), and supporting research and developing third-party verification systems to make sure producers follow shrimp welfare best practices. By 2030, they aim to reach a tipping point in stunner adoption so that it becomes the industry standard.

Again, if you’re a Substack writer, I’d appreciate it if you’d fill out the Google Form to let me know you want to participate. And if you want to donate to SWP right now, you can do so here. Every $1 you donate will help reduce the suffering of between 1,100 and 2,100 shrimps.

If you really want to help, you can share this article with other writers or write a call for articles of your own, include a link to the Google Form, and tag at least 10 people who might want to write about shrimp welfare. For my part, I’m calling on Bentham's Bulldog, Amos Wollen, Theodore Yohalem Shouse 🔸, Silas Abrahamsen, Ari Shtein, Connor Jennings, Andrew Doris, Andy Masley, Drew Housman, DeepLeftAnalysis🔸, Richard Y Chappell, and Jeff Tiedrich to join me.² If you have a relationship with a larger Substacker who might be sympathetic to shrimp welfare, like Richard Hanania, Matthew Yglesias (see his shrimp content here and here), Noah Smith, or Scott Alexander — or someone in the real world like Ezra Klein or Nick Kristof — please reach out to them as well.

Together, we can have an enormous (shr)impact!

1. Granted, I haven’t looked at a YouTube comment section in at least 10 years, so I may have a skewed idea of the baseline here.

2. Come on Jeff, I said I was sorry!