Written as part of the EA Forum's Marginal Funding Week 2025.

Exec Summary

I believe there’s a popular perspective in EA that animal welfare organisations can't absorb much more funding — but I actually think there are ambitious megaprojects in the movement (and within Shrimp Welfare Project specifically) that could each absorb millions of dollars. 

Shrimp Welfare Project doesn't have a funding gap, fortunately. I'm confident that by maintaining our current funding levels, we can continue to catalyse the future of shrimp welfare through cutting-edge research, collaborative corporate engagement, and farmer outreach. But, at the same time, I see real opportunities for large-scale funding to unlock exciting possibilities with exceptional impact, and I’m confident Shrimp Welfare Project is well-equipped to lead on them. We have concrete ideas that pave the way for new shrimp welfare solutions implemented across entire regions, potentially increasing our (Shr)Impact from our current ~4.5 billion per year to more than 100 billion shrimps per year, as soon as 2030.

Our Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) is already incredibly impactful, and the number of corporate partnerships in the program has essentially doubled each year since 2022. I believe there's potential for us to build on this momentum with ambitious projects that could absorb $5-10 million, allowing us to not just double the impact but 20x-ing it. 

Over the next year, Shrimp Welfare Project is prepared to execute on groundbreaking initiatives and accelerate the industry’s adoption of humane slaughter. We will also utilise about 10% of donations to fund exploratory projects, so we can identify the most effective interventions beyond slaughter and continue to guide the industry towards the best welfare practices of the future.

We currently have the following priorities we’re pursuing into 2026:

• Expanding the Humane Slaughter Initiative
  • Scaling up - Exploring ambitious opportunities to radically scale up the Humane Slaughter Initiative.
  • Catalysing Research
    • Increasing confidence - Investing more in research, implementation, and measurement & evaluation, to increase confidence in the effectiveness of HSI.
    • New Solutions & Protocols - Emphasising the Humane Slaughter in HSI - implementing pre-stun protocols, exploring stun-kill solutions, and faster slaughter where stunning isn’t feasible.
• Exploratory Projects
  • Scoping work - Closing the “welfare gap” in the scientific literature and commissioning self-contained scoping work to identify unexplored ways of making impact, such as in China or among wild-caught shrimps.
  • SSFI spin-out - Spinning out our program in India into its own organisation, enabling it to scale and shine on its own.
  • AI x Shrimps - Navigating the evolving landscape of the industry, aiming to steer the trajectory while still in the early stages of transition.

Some of these projects are in the very early stages, so we can’t provide too many details without jeopardising those partnerships.

Expanding the Humane Slaughter Initiative

We anticipate that ~90% of our budget going forward will go towards improving and expanding our flagship program, the Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI), along with associated overheads.

There is a credible path to scaling humane slaughter far beyond today’s deployments. Larger funding unlocks a step-change, not just “more of the same.” Think more countries and contexts, more humane harvest equipment, and deeper implementation support / follow-through.

Scaling Up

We now have 24 stunner commitments, bringing our total to ~4.5B shrimps helped in expectation per annum at a current cost-effectiveness of 1,400 per $ per year.

Additionally, 11 supermarket chains now have shrimp welfare policies (including 3 outside of the UK). And we’re having further promising conversations with retailers in continental Europe and the US.

For every stunner we deploy, we can impact ~100,000,000+ shrimps per year, meaning every additional stunner can generate a lot of impact. If we conceive of HSI as a true Animal Megaproject, we may be able to find opportunities to absorb millions of dollars^[1].

We’re exploring expanding our Corporate Engagement efforts (which usually start at the retailer level) and experimenting with a bottom-up approach (at the producer level), to allow us to laser-focus on specific and highly promising contexts where we think we have leverage to increase our impact.

To give a concrete example, what if we focused our efforts on a single shrimp-producing country, which is vertically-integrated and forward-thinking?

What if we work closely with producers to develop fit-for-purpose humane slaughter solutions that would be a no-brainer for them to implement? Leveraging our on-the-ground experience and industry position, we can start dreaming of a HSI 2.0 and ways in which we could massively catalyse industry adoption!

Some of the world's top exporting countries produce about 100 billion shrimps per year, meaning that providing the industry with practical pathways towards humane-slaughter at a nationwide level would drastically increase HSI's impact, allowing us to help exponentially more animals each year. 

To be clear, this is just an idea/example of the approach we are envisioning for HSI 2.0; we could also focus on smaller farmers in India or other examples of specific contexts and needs we could address as part of our expansion.

The broader point that I'm trying to illustrate is that HSI has the potential to scale in new and exciting ways. When Andrés and I first started out, we thought HSI would constitute a "success" if it was able to help one billion shrimps in total. But it soon became clear that it was within our grasp to help a billion shrimps each year, and now that we're at ~4.5 billion per year, I'm looking ahead and envisioning HSI 2.0 as a truly groundbreaking project that could accelerate our impact above and beyond what I initially thought was possible. I'm not aware of any other project that has reached the scale of impacting 100 billion animals per year, and I believe that Shrimp Welfare Project is in the position to execute on a project of that magnitude.

Catalysing Research

Increasing Confidence

Our Theory of Change in late 2022 (when the idea for the Humane Slaughter Initiative really started to crystallise) rested on some key assumptions:

• Research into optimisation of electrical stunning can be carried out by universities.
• Implementation of stunners can be carried out by the equipment manufacturers.
• Therefore, it was the goal of Shrimp Welfare Project to focus on the third piece of this puzzle - catalysing industry uptake of this technology.

However, it became increasingly clear throughout 2025 that we need to be more involved in both research and implementation. We are now present at every stunner installation, and heavily involved in ongoing and new research.

It’s possible that this is our biggest focus in 2026 (i.e. we may need to slow down to speed up^[2]). This probably looks something like:

• Research: Increasing our involvement and coordination with ongoing research projects^[3], as well as getting more research done quickly (we’re excited by this call for proposals from Arthropoda Foundation  - expressions of interest are due January 15!). Shrimp Welfare Project also hopes to contribute to the growing body of research in the form of case studies, documenting data and practice knowledge from the field, etc.
• Implementation: Our Corporate Engagement coordinators have really stepped up this year, travelling to multiple installations and overseeing implementation. The practical experience gained from the field directly contributes to building our knowledge on Humane Slaughter, which we share with the industry through ongoing support including technical advice, guidelines, protocols, reports, case studies, and presentations. We're also seeing how strengthening implementation improves operational efficiency. By identifying challenges faced by producers in implementation, we are able to explore and develop solutions and improve the Humane Slaughter process.
  • However, this work is a big ask for our Corporate Engagement coordinators, over and above their current workload of securing new commitments. Hiring in-country field coordinators, who can lead on logistics and implementation, should help here^[4].
  • Additionally, we’re working more with current manufacturers and engaging in more in-depth dialogues with them on protocols and improvements to optimise best-practices for welfare.
• Measurement, Evaluation, & Learning: More active MEL on stunner effectiveness in 2026 (i.e. when new stunners aren’t being installed, our new field coordinators can monitor the effectiveness of existing implementations). We also think it’s possible to ultimately automate verification of the use and effectiveness of the stunners^[5]. Finally, we’re collaborating with other organisations in this space (The Mission Motor, and Rethink Priorities) to increase our capacity and confidence in our ongoing MEL efforts.

New Solutions & Protocols

We’ve developed a bit of a reputation as the charity that gives away free electrical stunners — and while that is a major component of the Humane Slaughter Initiative, we are doing more than that. Going forward, we’re making it clearer that Shrimp Welfare Project is supporting the industry in its transition to humane slaughter at every step of the way by providing equipment, expert guidance, technical support, and supply-chain consulting. We’re also creating new outreach channels to share research updates and field reports with our corporate contacts, keeping the industry up-to-date on the latest developments and allowing us to address any concerns or challenges they’re facing with implementing higher-welfare practices in their businesses.

Emphasising the Humane Slaughter^[6] in HSI - Humane slaughter is more nuanced than installing a pre-slaughter electric stunner in a couple of important ways:

• Pre-Stun - There can be additional welfare risks if the process of getting shrimps to the stunner is poor (i.e. being carried in a net, rather than transported via a pump using a “harvester”)
• Post-Stun - However if the shrimps do not remain unconscious until death (i.e. if there is a poorly implemented slaughter method, like badly implemented - or no - ice slurry) they can recover and still experience pain and distress during the process.
• No Stun - There are contexts where stunning is (currently) not feasible, but slaughter could still be improved. For example, in contexts where pre-slaughter stunning isn't possible, a well-implemented “chill-killing” via ice slurry is preferable to asphyxiation in the air.

We want to see more research into humane slaughter more generally (especially in new contexts). It may turn out that there are other, faster slaughter methods available, in which case, we still think there are opportunities to improve the slaughter process.

We therefore want to explore solutions for humane slaughter that go beyond an electrical stunner - different contexts might need different solutions (due to operational feasibility, costs, etc). 

What if it were possible to design a machine that can stun and kill whiteleg shrimps at harvest^[7]? This would reduce the need for effective ice slurry protocols to ensure the shrimps are killed before recovering consciousness. We’re very excited about having custom solutions for different farming contexts^[8].

If we’re going to find ways to scale up HSI, we’re likely also going to want to find ways to reduce the cost of stunners. This is for a few reasons:

• It could increase our cost-effectiveness^[9].
• It could make Megaprojects more realistic^[10].
• It could lower our requirement for deploying a new stunner at our current cost-effectiveness, increasing the number of shrimp companies we can reach and building pathways for smallholder farmers to implement humane slaughter^[11].

In 2025, we began working closely with technology providers to advance humane slaughter equipment so it comes at a lower price point and is more fit-for-purpose for shrimp producers. We are planning on continuing work in this space into 2026 and beyond.

Exploratory Projects

We’re starting to more intentionally use ~10% of our budget^[12] on Exploratory projects (typically projects under $100k) which we believe can catalyse the future of shrimp welfare beyond humane slaughter.

Scoping Work

While the Humane Slaughter Initiative is still the focus of Shrimp Welfare Project, we think it makes sense to have some parallel work on closing the "welfare gap" in the scientific literature, enabling us to move on to further interventions in the shrimp welfare space, once we hit the tipping point for Humane Slaughter.

Some examples of work we’ve already done in this space:

• Ren Ryba authored a book titled Shrimp and Prawn Welfare in the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry on September 26, 2025. The book was co-authored by Shrimp Welfare Project’s Research & Policy Lead Shannon Davis, along with Yip Fai Tse, and Peter Singer.
• Supporting a project on the world’s first prototype of an onboard stunning and tailing machine for wild-caught Nephrops (also known as scampi or langoustines).
• Contributing to the online training tool Camarones Care^[13] designed to support suppliers in building foundational knowledge and practical competencies in shrimp welfare.

As mentioned previously, we’re very excited about the work that Arthropoda Foundation is doing to catalyse work in this space, particularly with their recent call for proposals focusing on shrimps. Examples of potential projects, outside the realm of humane slaughter, are:

• Evaluating bioluminescence as an indicator of stress
• Performing substrate preference tests
• Assessing feasible environmental enrichments

However, knowing what constitutes good shrimp welfare is only half the battle. We also need to figure out ways to make change on-the-ground.

Going forward, we want to put more deliberate effort into commissioning self-contained projects and undertaking further scoping work to identify unexplored ways of making impact. Some examples of projects we’re interested in are:

Credits - A market-based approach that decouples humane stunning practices from direct product purchases, creating economic incentives for producers to adopt electrical stunning equipment. Global Food Partners already has a Credits system for cage-free, which they call Impact Incentives. We’re currently exploring partnering with GFP to implement a Credits system for shrimps (though this project specifically is on hold while we focus on increasing confidence).

China - China produces about a third of the worlds shrimps and is also the largest importer, so it's worthwhile for us to explore ways that we can support higher-welfare in that market. It may well be the case that our biggest path to impact here is a nationwide HSI 2.0 in another country that exports to China. However, we still think we should hire a China Program Coordinator for a year or so to carry out more intentional Scoping work^[14].

Wild-Caught - 25 trillion (90% SCI: 6.5 trillion – 66 trillion) wild shrimp are directly slaughtered annually, a figure that represents the vast majority of all animals directly killed by humans out of which food is produced. Ren’s book - Shrimp and Prawn Welfare in the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry - lists some potential interventions in this space^[15], but additional on-the-ground scoping work could give us a better sense of the tractability of their recommendations. Additionally, the aforementioned Nephrops study (an onboard stunner) could be an indicator of the industry's interest in exploring the feasibility, and development, of humane slaughter at-sea for wild-caught decapods.

Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India spin-off

Animal Charity Evaluators included the following in their recent review of Shrimp Welfare Project:

our cost-effectiveness estimates for the programs we selected for analysis were 47 (42 to 52) Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) averted per dollar for the Humane Slaughter Initiative program, and 299 (190 to 353) SADs averted per dollar for the Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India program.

We think the impact of SSFI is often drowned out by the scale and scope of HSI. We also think SSFI has made progress on one of the toughest problems in the animal movement - how to make a cost-effective, scaleable impact with smallholder farmers in LMICs. We also want to start thinking about shrimp welfare as more of an ecosystem, rather than just Shrimp Welfare Project.

We’ve therefore begun the process of spinning out SSFI as its own organisation in India, and think this has multiple operational benefits in terms of human resources, fundraising, and organisational structure. It sometimes feels strange that SSFI “reports” to the international team, when almost all of the impact we’ve had in India is due to their initiatives.

We think SSFI will likely still have weekly check-ins and feel part of the broader Shrimp Welfare Project organisation for the next year or so, but slowly become more independent. Shrimp Welfare Project will likely provide a “kickstart” grant to the new SSFI organisation to provide funding and a runway, but are keen to start fundraising for SSFI independently (in particular, if there are any Indian donors interested in this - please reach out!).

In general, we’re excited about this idea of “spinning-out” organisations. It may be the case that some of the projects we explore as part of our scoping work ultimately become a project that is incubated within Shrimp Welfare Project and then spun-out as its own organisation.

AI x Shrimps

An idea that came out of our 2024 Shrimposium was “Precision Welfare,” creating a workstream focused on:

Navigating the evolving landscape of the industry, aiming to steer the trajectory while still in the early stages of transition, using Precision Aquaculture to monitor and optimise for welfare outcomes.

While Precision Welfare is still the primary way we expect to make impact in this space, we wanted to broaden the potential scope of this ambition to “AI x Shrimps”, to fit with the broader framing of “AI x Animals” and enable us to explore interventions outside of precision welfare. Currently, we’re envisioning this as three interrelated projects:

Welfare Outcomes - Researching new Asks that represent "iceberg indicators" of shrimp welfare that are "outcome-based" (not Input-Based). It may not be possible to have a one-size-fits-all input-based Ask for shrimp farming, due to the complexity and variation of farming systems. Having “Iceberg Indicators” allows us to cover multiple welfare problems at once, without dictating how to achieve higher welfare - enabling the industry to innovate. We’re therefore working with the Welfare Footprint Institute on a research project to:

• Conduct literature reviews on shrimp physiology, neurobiology, and behaviour
• Evaluate candidate welfare indicators and monitoring feasibility
• Collaborate with WFI researchers, Shrimp Welfare Project, and external partners
• Contribute to at least one peer-reviewed publication

Precision Welfare - If “Welfare Outcomes” is about developing the Ask, then “Precision Welfare” is about implementing it^[16]. Though we’re hoping that whatever Welfare Outcomes we discover are pretty universal across shrimp farms, we think a sensible place to start advocating for their implementation is in RAS Farms (they’re more technically advanced for monitoring, and maybe trying to set themselves apart in the market). While the WFI work is ongoing, we’re hoping to continue building relationships with promising industry folks in this space.

Certification Auditing - As discussed above, a promising application of the increased development of AI tools in the shrimp industry is the continuous monitoring they enable. We want to explore the willingness of certification schemes (and their auditing companies) to use/require continuous monitoring of their schemes with AI tools. We’re hoping for this to be a project in collaboration with organisations like Aquatic Life Institute, due to their existing work with certifiers.

Shrimp Welfare Project turned 4 years old in September, and reached a (Shr)Impact number of 4 billion the same month. Back in 2021, the idea that shrimp welfare would become part of industry and public conversations worldwide would have seemed crazy to us. 

There's still much to do, but the momentum is undeniable. We’re proud of how far the field has come in such a short time, and we’re excited for what the future has in store.

1. ^{^}

   Additionally the HSI program is somewhat unique in being able to absorb lots of funding without having too much of an effect on our core operational costs. We therefore think finding these opportunities is important, even if we are not able to fundraise to achieve them, as it shouldn’t require a fundamental restructuring of Shrimp Welfare Project either way to achieve.

2. ^{^}

   It’s likely though that this work can happen in tandem with scaling up - i.e. we can work on securing commitments from producers/retailers, but not requiring implementation until we have increased our confidence in the solutions we’re deploying.

3. ^{^}

   We're currently involved in ~5 research projects in this space. Unfortunately, while most of these are still in-progress, we are unable to say much more due to NDAs/Confidentiality agreements

^{^}

It’s also possible that we ultimately spin-off a non-profit that focuses exclusively on implementation - if we want to get to a tipping point where the industry is implementing humane slaughter on their own, we want to ensure that this is still done correctly. Having an organisation that can be contracted to do this would ensure we have confidence in the ongoing effectiveness of the program, even in a world where Humane Slaughter is no longer Shrimp Welfare Project’s primary focus.

^{^}

For example, this could range from a pilot project (having an SD card record when a stunner was active and how much voltage ran through it) all the way up to a camera that records when stunners are being run, and uses machine vision algorithms to detect if shrimps are moving post-stun (based on behavioural indicators correlated to EEG data)

^{^}

Stunning - only refers to the act of rendering the animal unconscious (within a second). Humane Slaughter - generally defined as the rapid induction of a state in which the animal is unable to experience pain, distress, or other aversive experiences, maintained until death occurs.

^{^}

Shrimps can be killed by increasing the voltage on a stunner, but this “cooks” the shrimps, which is bad for product quality. However, it seems that increasing the duration of electricity can reliably kill shrimps - it’s likely possible to design a machine in such a way as to reliably stun and kill shrimps.

^{^}

e.g. A machine that had an integrated harvester (to improve the pre-stun process), and was built to increase the duration that electrical current is passing through the shrimps (to stun and kill shrimps via electricity).

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Our shrimps impacted per $ would increase if the price per stunner decreased, and if the minimum volume of shrimp didn’t also decrease

^{^}

If a stunner costs ~$50k currently, but we found ways to make them cost ~$10k, then deploying ~1,000 stunners suddenly seems more feasible - fundraising for $10m over the next few years is likely more feasible than $50m.

^{^}

Meeting our requirement of ~100m shrimps per year to qualify for a $50k stunner is beyond the capacity of many shrimp producers. However, if a stunner costs $10k instead, the requirement would go down to ~20m, significantly expanding the scope of producers we can work with and increasing our ability to support higher-welfare among smallholder farmers.

^{^}

If a project is likely to cost more than $100k, we may contribute up to $100k towards the project, but would likely also fundraise for the project independently (this forces us to better articulate the decision, and get buy-in from funders).

^{^}

Camarones is a Spanish plural for shrimp. Interestingly, there are multiple words for shrimp in Spanish, and camarón is the one used in Latin America, whereas gamba is used more in Spain.

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We currently see three potential avenues to explore for impact: 
• Being part of HSI - finding producers in China who do export (we realise it may not be a lot, but we think we may be writing off all of China based on our narrative of what the majority do, whereas there may be lot of impact still within the small percentage that do export. We think we made a similar mistake in the past not engaging enough with India with regards to HSI).
• Doing exploratory work to try and spin up the “Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of China” 
• Engaging with Precision Welfare type work (we’ve heard the RAS farms in China are high tech)

^{^}

From Shrimp and Prawn Welfare in the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry:
In industrial trawl fisheries, some promising interventions are: 
• Installing electrical stunners on trawl vessels 
• Reducing trawl durations 
• Reducing trawl weights (having less weight of prawns in the trawl net before it is hauled onto the vessel) 
• Optimising on-board logistics to reduce the shrimp processing time, thereby preventing asphyxiation and reducing temperature stress 
• Continuing existing work on reducing bycatch 

In small-scale fisheries, particularly in developing countries, it may be more plausible to instead focus on: 
• Finding ways to help governments enforce existing fisheries regulations 
• Optimising shrimp storage and hygiene processes on-board and on land to reduce spoilage, thereby reducing the wastage of shrimp due to hygiene or contamination issues 
• Encouraging people to modify the way shrimp paste is made to contain a lower content of shrimp 

And crucially, it would be really useful to conduct extra research: 
• Basic (experimental) research on shrimp sentience. There are a few important knowledge gaps in the evidence for shrimp sentience and whether sentience differs between shrimp groups. 
• Applied research on shrimp welfare, such as what capture methods and on-board conditions cause the most stress. 
• Improving the data on the number of shrimp killed by shrimp fisheries in each country. There are some well-known problems with fisheries data in general, and shrimp fisheries in particular have high levels of bycatch and unreported catch.

^{^}

We also hope there are devices we can use to 24/7 monitor these Asks (or that we can develop them). The emergence of AI monitoring tools in aquaculture is typically referred to as “Precision Aquaculture” (compared to Precision Livestock Farming with land animals). We want to try and normalise the term “Precision Welfare”, to refer to using these AI tools to monitor (and optimise) for welfare.

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