Can’t give up prawns? We need to talk about the shocking practice of eyestalk ablation
SCHOOL OF THOUGHT: Wrestling with the unshakable feeling that you just can’t give up ‘seafood’? We get it, we’ve all been there. For many people considering switching to veganism, giving up aquatic animals is a major challenge. So it might help to learn about this shocking procedure carried out in almost all prawn farms around the world.
According to Animals Australia, eyestalk ablation - basically the removal of one or both of a mother prawn’s eyes to stimulate egg production - happens in “almost all prawn farms around the world”. Given that farmed shrimp accounts for 55 per cent of all the shrimp produced globally - mostly in China, Thailand and Indonesia and exported around the world - there is a very good chance that you’ve eaten prawns from farms that do this.
Cutting one or both eyes off at the stalk destroys the gland that regulates spawning in female prawns meaning that they reproduce faster. The benefits of this are obvious, and in countries where animal welfare laws are less developed or not as well enforced, the impetus to reduce the suffering inflicted by eyestalk ablation is far less with many fisheries doing it without anaesthetic.
Methods include cutting with a razor blade; cauterisation with a hot blade or forceps; ligation or tying off with a thread or wire much like tail docking; or simply squeezing the eyestalk between the fingers until it comes away. Considering that the science leans towards prawns having an experience of pain both during ablation and afterwards, an indication of suffering, these methods are inarguably cruel and barbaric.
A 2012 study into eyestalk ablation and pain in prawns, conducted by researchers at Mexico’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional and published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that both cutting and crushing, and ligation, all caused prawns to exhibit behaviours associated with pain and stress after the fact. Disorientation, tail flicking as an escape reflex and rubbing of the affected area, plus a lower likelihood of seeking out shelter indicating stress.
The use of anaesthetic was found to reduce the above indicators considerably, evidence that pain is indeed a factor in prawns and that they aren’t simply unfeeling biological automata, as many of us believe - something to consider the next time you see prawns boiled alive in a pot of water.
In our article Do lobsters feel pain?, we referred to research by Dr Robert Elwood, emeritus professor at the school of biological sciences at Queen’s University Belfast, who in 2018 told the Guardian that there was no reason to assume crustaceans would not have the same evolutionary advantage of experiencing pain as a protection against harm.
“The argument is: we know the areas involved in pain experienced in humans; if you don’t have those areas, you can’t feel pain,” said Elwood. “But it’s quite clear that, in evolution, completely different structures have arisen to have exactly the same function – crustaceans don’t have a visual cortex anything like that of a human, but they can see. Given the evolutionary advantage of experiencing pain, there is no reason to assume they should not have this protection against tissue damage.”
Elwood has also studied the way prawns react to negative stimuli and concluded that their behaviour was "consistent with the interpretation of pain experience." There is a fine line between prolonged experience of pain and the subjective experience of suffering, but with scientific opinion divided, surely the best option is to avoid the risk entirely.
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Whether prawns feel pain or not is to many animal rights advocates irrelevant from an ethical perspective. The avoidance of taking life should not be dependent on how greatly an animal suffers, or how excellent welfare standards are, especially when the abuses of prawn farming don’t just stop at eyestalk ablation. Campaigning for the use of anaesthetic is not going to prevent every other misdemeanour carried out so we can enjoy prawn toast from the Chinese takeaway and scampi with our Friday fish suppers.
Jim Wickens of the Daily Mail wrote that he would never eat prawns again after witnessing the ‘stomach churning’ Thai prawn trade firsthand with its abysmal working conditions and slave labour, not to mention the indiscriminate environmental destruction caused by trawlers gathering ‘trash fish’ for prawn feed. Sea snakes, octopus, sea horses, pufferfish, crabs and starfish are all secondary victims of the prawn farming industry, dredged up in weighted nets dragged across the seafloor, destroying habitats and breeding populations.
And then there are the world’s mangrove forests, 38 per cent of which have been destroyed to make way for shrimp farms, fuelling an environmental crisis in some of the world’s poorest nations, according to a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation. The destruction of wetlands and mangrove deforestation also involves the use of chemical pollutants, antibiotics, fertilisers, disinfectants and pesticides, all of which may be harmful to human health. Plus the salination of water from the farms can change the composition of local soils, impacting agriculture.
So what can we do about eyestalk ablation? Animals Australia urges people to join calls for the industry to simply stop cutting eyes off, referring to research that shows it is actually ineffective and unnecessary. This however falls very short, failing to consider the many other consequences of prawn production. The answer is clearly to do away with prawn and fish farming altogether, and that can only come with both government action and a change in consumer behaviour.
For everyone at the start of this article who related to the difficulty of giving up the experience of eating prawns and marine life - the taste, smells and textures - there is hope. More than hope, really, as the vegan alternatives are improving with every startup and every innovation in the alternative protein industry. The recently announced The No Catch Co. and its first No Catch restaurant in Brighton, UK, is betting on the popularity of its tofish, prawns and other ‘seafood’ analogues to give new and prospective vegans the same experience of fish and chips while promoting a mission of compassion.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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