Seeing Like a Shrimp Lover

Some people think shrimps are majestic. Can you?

There’s a great post by Sasha Chapin called “How to Like Everything More.” It’s about how we can get better at liking just about anything if we actually try. For instance, what if you sat still and paid close attention while listening to a piece of music from a genre you don’t like? You just might find bits of it that speak to you. Chapin’s thesis is that if you approach life with this general attitude you can increase your overall enjoyment.

I have been doing a mini version of that with shrimp. They are not the most charismatic farmed animal, so I found it hard to empathize with them. I thought their behavior consisted of randomly bumbling about in the water, doing nothing of interest. I never even considered what they looked like while alive, being so conditioned to seeing them in cooked form.

Then I started perusing the subreddit r/shrimptank. It’s a community of more than 200,000 people who absolutely love shrimp. They raise them in tanks and think of them as pets. One of the most popular threads on the subreddit consists of people sharing how annoyed they get when people see their pets and joke about eating them.

The Redditors love that shrimps have “little rat faces”. I now appreciate their bizarre little heads and bulging eyes too.

This user thinks their shrimp is particularly cute, and I gotta say I agree with that as well.

Another heartwarming thread on r/shrimptank is titled “What is it about shrimp that you like so much?” There are hundreds of comments of people extolling the virtues of shrimp. A representative example:

They have little grabbers and little faces and little legs and little swimmers. Sometimes they ride snails. Sometimes they hang upside down. It’s just so god damn whimsical.

Another:

Just today, I was watching an Amano shrimp that grabbed onto a loose Anubias leaf and rode it around the tank as it floated in the gentle current. She'd balance carefully to remain on top, but now and then it'd flip over so she'd scamper around to be on top again, just sailing around the tank. She wasn't eating anything, just riding that leaf. It was awesome to watch.

Mine seem to really like to ride stuff, in fact - I've got a couple mystery snails, and you can always find a shrimp on one or the other just cruising around the tank, taking in the sights.

source

I grant that many of these people are killing a lot of shrimp while they breed them. But the numbers that die in home tanks pale in comparison to the billions killed on farms, so I’m hoping the shrimp enthusiasts’ contribution to shrimp-kind can still be a net positive.

I know the fact that shrimp seem to enjoy surfing means nothing, scientifically speaking. But isn’t life just a little more fun when you imagine it brings them joy? And aren’t you just a teensy bit less likely to eat a shrimp without a second thought?

Sadly, if they feel happiness, they also probably feel the painful things that happen to them on the farms.

We don’t want to watch shrimp die, which tells me something

I found a YouTube short of a guy showing how to kill and eat a prawn. At the moment he’s about to show himself “making a slit in the center of the head” with a giant knife, the video cuts away. Why?

I think it’s because viewers would recoil at least a little at watching the killing. Even though the animal is not screaming or grimacing, something within us recognizes this not like killing an oyster. That prawn looks like it could feel something! My kid could fall in love with a stuffed animal that looked like that.

To be fair, I was able to find videos of people ripping live shrimp in half with their bare hands, so it’s not like everyone is shy about showing crustacean gore. Still, the fact that some are squeamish tells me something.

If one of my kids did fall in love with a shrimp, and then saw a video of how they are killed, he’d be appalled. As are many adults. This video from We Animals shows farmed shrimp as they are being processed. We can’t know if they are actually feeling anything, but they look to be struggling much the same way any sentient being would if they were similarly frozen and suffocated to death.

Yes, those twitches might just be reflexes. Shrimp might not have the brain structures required to feel pain. Yes, even a bacteria will “run away” from a light source, or whatever. But I’m just saying, if someone on r/shrimptank saw their pet behaving like that while being suffocated and frozen, I bet they’d feel lots of empathy for their little friend.

When we think shrimp, we think of cooked up, shriveled, little pink things. But the world of shrimp is vast and interesting. There are multicolored ones, big ones, small ones, and ones that have the most complex eyes in existence.

Eyestalk ablation, or the practice of smashing in the eyes of shrimp to make them more fertile, would feel like even more of a travesty for this beauty (source)

They might each be feeling individuals. Is it really such a huge ask to treat them with the tiniest sliver of kindness when they are ugly and grey, too?

We don’t torture our pets, so let’s not torture shrimp

Shrimp can be cute. They have a self-preservation instinct. Many people think they can feel pain. They are defenseless against the whims of humans. They are revered as pets in certain cultures. All the same reasons we might give for not killing a dog or cat can be applied to the shrimps as well, if you squint.

I get that it’s unlikely that advocating for shrimp as being cute will help them in any way. After all, rats can be cute and whimsical too. Rats can star in Pixar movies. Yet we have no problem as a society using horrifically painful rodentecides to get rid of rodents en masse.

Still, as awful as we treat rats, we at least don’t farm them by the trillions, smash their eyeballs just to make them breed faster, and freeze them alive to kill them. The shrimp really do have it rough. Which is why I’m hoping that promoting shrimps as interesting, complex, lovable creatures gets some people to want to hurt them a little less. After all, the movie Ratatouille apparently led to a massive surge in people wanting rats as pets. Presumably, those people also became a little less likely to want to indiscriminately murder them. Shrimp need to have their Ratatouille moment.

The shrimp welfare movement has done a great job of showing how horrible the lives of farmed shrimp are. I hope it’s a little helpful to also show how delightful their lives can be when they are treated with just a smidge of dignity. Maybe that will lead to some reduced suffering down the line. In the meantime, giving to the Shrimp Welfare Project so that their deaths are less painful is the best way we know to reduce suffering in the here and now, so we should do that too.

Finally, if you are yearning for more shrimp content, you’re in luck! We are in the midst of a massive Shrimptastic fundraiser, put on by FarmKind, and featuring tons of awesome bloggers. Never before have the crustaceans been put on such a pedestal, and I’m happy to be doing my little part to help them out.