The "Crazy Shrimp Activists” Are Badly Wrong

On Sea Monkeys, scale, and an eery experience in my childhood bedroom.

The shrimp activists at work.

The Shrimpact campaign might be the worst PR move in the history of animal rights. Over the last few months, prominent bloggers and organizations have been arguing that campaigns to reduce shrimp suffering, such as the use of electrical stunning machines at shrimp farms, have “massive” importance. One writes that they’re the most high-impact use of a charitable dollar.

And the internet has responded with mockery and rage. “Nothing has turned me against the effective altruist crowd more than ‘shrimp welfare,’” one commenter wrote. Millions of others, including the prominent tech writer Mike Solana, joined the trolling.

That includes me. As a mass killer of shrimp myself – more on that in a bit – it is with great satisfaction that I share my own assessment: the Crazy Shrimp Activists are badly wrong.

But they are not wrong because their cause is unworthy. Shrimp feel pain. Indeed, shrimp and other crustaceans have yet to fail a single significant test of sentience. They tend to their wounds. They avoid places after they’ve had a bad experience. They even respond to painkillers! Moreover, given that around 500 billion shrimp are slaughtered in farms every year, they are a strong candidate for the most abused animal on earth. The Shrimpact folks should have our thanks for taking on such a massive but neglected cause. (Consider giving them a donation. I’ll be giving $100 myself today.)

So then why do I say the Crazy Shrimp Activists are wrong? Because they don’t go far enough. The problem of shrimp suffering is vastly bigger than even the shrimp activists are saying. And this is a broader issue that I call the 1% Problem.

The 1% Problem occurs when we become focused on a small part of a problem — arbitrarily, say 1% – when a much larger one also needs to be addressed. Black Lives Matter focused on police killings, which afflict around 1000 people every year, relative to the nearly 2 million Americans (mostly people of color) trapped in prisons and jails. Climate activists focused on divestment from fossil fuels by university endowments, which constituted perhaps 0.1% of the total market cap for fossil fuels. And animal rights activists, including me, have focused on relatively small industries (e.g., elephants in circuses, chimps in labs) rather than the massive abusers, such as factory farms, that dominate the landscape of animal cruelty. Movements struggle to create systemic change when their attention is trapped by the 1% Problem.¹

We rescued Julie from a lab. Should we have focused on bigger fish… or shrimp?

But wait, I am sure you are asking. Wasn’t the Shrimpact campaign designed to overcome the 1% Problem? The numbers involved are massive: hundreds of billions of individual lives. The answer is: yes, but they are still missing the full problem by 100x or more. There are three reasons why.

The first is the problem of total suffering. The Shrimpact campaigns focus on a few tractable issues: ending eyestalk removal and adopting humane slaughter. While these are important problems, there are so many other evils inflicted on shrimp: the crowding of thousands of animals in a space the size of a bath tub; filthy water that leaves them desperate for oxygen; and transport systems that crush billions to death. Indeed, around 50% of farmed shrimp die before they reach slaughter.

What is true of shrimp farming is true of many other initiatives. Cage-free egg campaigns, for example, have been fantastically successful, but they don’t do enough to bring attention to other major causes of suffering in egg farms: mass cannibalism, abdominal infections that cause the birds to swell up like balloons, and the routine mutilation of beaks, for example. This leaves opportunities for impact – notably, strategies for abolishing the entire system – sitting on the table. At worst, it may even trade small gains for entrenchment of a much larger problem.

We found thousands of distressed animals at this “cage-free” Costco supplier.

The second 1% Problem is the problem of wild animals. Even in the space of shrimp advocacy, the most numerous victims of human abuse of shrimp are not farmed shrimp but those harmed in the wild. Conservative estimates suggest that tens of trillions of wild shrimp are caught every year in trawl nets, and dragged for hours as they suffocate to death. That is perhaps 100x larger than the number killed in farms.

This, again, is a wider gap in animal advocacy. Wild rodents are likely the most abused mammals on earth, but few advocate for rat rights. The bristlemouth fish is the most numerous vertebrate on earth – and dying off due to human deoxygenation of oceans – yet I’ve never seen one on a protest sign. Rats and bristlemouths are just examples of a bigger problem: wild animals are the primary victims of speciesism, yet even among animal advocates, barely anyone thinks about them. This includes the Shrimpact campaign. I could not find a single reference to wild shrimp on any website affiliated with the campaign.

The third and most important 1% Problem is the problem of joy. And now I’ll remind you of my confession: I am a mass murderer of shrimp. The victims in question were Sea Monkeys, aka brine shrimp, who as a young child I flushed down the toilet with impunity. The tiny animals – which are sold with small plastic aquariums and eggs in disposable pouches that look like tea bags – felt more like a toy than living beings. Until one day, I saw them experience joy.

I had set my aquarium down near a window in my bedroom, and when I came back I noticed something odd. The sunlight had split the tank in two, and the Sea Monkeys all seemed to be swimming on the bright side of their aquatic home.

“Why are the Sea Monkeys doing that?” I asked my dad, a molecular biologist.

“The sunlight feels good to them,” he responded.

“The Sea Monkeys… can feel joy?” I gasped.

My days as a slaughterer of Sea Monkeys ended on that day.

Sea Monkeys are cute — and deserving of compassion.

There is a broader point here. When we think of animal advocacy, we typically think only about how to avoid suffering. And yet our own subjective experience, and the revealed preference of other living beings, should tell us that suffering is not all that matters. To the contrary, sentient beings will often endure great pain to achieve something that brings them joy. This is the reason cold plunges have become all the rage, why a movie filled with heartbreak can become a box-office success, and why injured veterans from a “good war” like World War II happily regale you with stories of their own trauma (and rarely suffer PTSD). In all those cases, the pain comes with a purpose. For that reason, focusing only on pain, when individuals seek joy and meaning, misses 99% of what matters.

Could shrimp feel the same way? We cannot say for sure, but an increasing body of evidence suggests that shrimp – and many other animals – can also feel joy. Shrimp dance before mating. They enjoy a tranquil moment in the pool. They even respond to Prozac! To truly defend shrimp, then, we may have to do more than prevent suffering. We have to be curious about shrimp joy.

The 1% Problems are, of course, not distinct to the Shrimpact campaign. Indeed, the effective altruists who launched the campaign are doing as good a job as any of us in overcoming these problems. It’s for that reason that I’d encourage you to give to the Shrimpact campaign; it’s pushing the envelope in a helpful way!

But the 1% Problem should make us question and reflect: even as we try to do good, is there some “crazy” idea out there that shows we can do exponentially more? Because when we do, we may realize that the problem with the Crazy Shrimp Activists is that they’re not crazy enough.

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What else is going on?

• Zoe Rosenberg faces sentencing for the “crime” of animal rescue on Wednesday, December 3. This verdict is a profound miscarriage of justice and could have devastating consequences on Zoe, who suffers from Type 1 diabetes. I was able to spend time with her for the first time in two years, however, just yesterday, due to the end of my probation. I’ll have more to say about this case soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, follow Zoe and DxE for the latest updates.

• Appropriately, given Zoe’s verdict, I will be speaking on a Zoom panel on December 10 on the Right to Rescue with two distinguished law professors. Prof. Justin Marceau and Prof. Matthew Liebman are two of the leading scholars writing about civil disobedience and animal rights. I’m honored the International Centre for Animal Rights is hosting this important discussion. Register here.

• I was also recently on Animal Rights: The Debate with a prominent lawyer and judge in the United Kingdom. We discussed the potential of direct action to transform systems of violence across the globe. This was a particularly relevant conversation because my wife Rose is facing prosecution in early 2026, and other activists with Animal Rising are going on trial today. Listen here.

• My latest piece in Current Affairs is on the coming revolution for animal rights. Many people, even animal advocates, believe that victory for animal rights is remote and very far in the future. I explain why that’s wrong in the piece.

I’m going to apologize again for not getting these newsletters out as often as I’d like. It’s been a repeated refrain. But my New Year’s resolution will be to post every day on this blog, with at least two blogs each week good enough to send out to the entire newsletter. This will be particularly important for me to stay in touch with you all given that I’ll likely be moving to London in early 2026. Stay tuned, and thanks!

1. The reasons for the 1% Problem are numerous. But two are particularly notable. The first is a form of status quo bias that Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert has called the End of History Illusion. We have a tendency to believe that change rarely happens when, in fact, change is as natural as sunlight or rain. That makes us falsely focus on 1% solutions when 100% solutions are possible. The second is scope insensitivity. Humans struggle to see the full scale of the problem because their perception is limited. This is the reason for the adage, “One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.”