Document type: article published in Reporterre
Author: Hortense Chauvin
Preview: Grab a prawn from a bowl, prise open its shell between your fingers, dip it in sauce, and swallow it. It's a common thing to do, especially during the holiday season. But to make it possible, a different, much less trivial action must first have been performed: tearing away the eyestalks of female prawns while they are still alive. Since the 1970s, French prawn consumption has tripled. However, local production is very limited: just 350 tons of pink prawns and 50 tons of tiger prawns are produced in France. To satisfy our appetite for prawns, we import 84,000 tons of the crustacean each year, mainly from Ecuador, India, Vietnam, and Madagascar. Fifty-six percent of these animals are produced by aquaculture, the rest come from fishing that is mostly industrial.
Cutting, cauterizing, ligating
Prawn farming has harmful effects on the environment. In particular, it encourages the destruction of mangrove forests that grow in the margin between land and sea, replacing them with pond systems. According to data from the Solagro association, the annual consumption of prawns by the French public is responsible for the deforestation of 43,000 hectares of overseas mangroves. This means that there are fewer nursery habitats for wild fish larvae.
It also raises ethical questions. Around 440 billion farmed prawns are killed each year, making them by far the most consumed animal in the world (in monetary terms). This industry relies on a little-known but widespread practice: eyestalk ablation. This involves the severing of the antennae that connect the eyes of breeding females to the rest of their bodies by cutting, cauterizing, or ligation. A prawn's eyes contain a gland that influences its hormonal system. Ablation is thought to speed up how quickly the ovaries of breeding females mature, synchronizing their cycles and increasing the frequency of egg-laying. All of which is intended to increase production.
Invisible suffering
But at what cost? Whereas the suffering of farm animals on land has become an issue that slightly impinges on our awareness, thesufferinginflicted on their aquatic counterparts remains absent from public debate. The explanation given by Amy P. Wilson, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg and a specialist in aquatic animal rights, is the lack of research on crustacean "sentience" (i.e., their ability to feel pain and have subjective experiences). "There is a huge gap in our scientific knowledge of the needs of each of the hundreds of aquatic species we farm. Unlike land animals, fish, octopuses, and other decapods are not part of our everyday landscape. "Their suffering is invisible." Research on the welfare of farmed prawns is patchy. But there is enough information for eyestalk ablation to be described as "problematic", according to Amy P. Wilson. A number of studies [1] have shown that breeding prawns, after having their eyes removed, exhibit behaviors that may indicate pain: erratic swimming, sudden tail movements, prolonged rubbing of the amputated area, curling up at the bottom of the tank, etc. These behaviors were absent when an anesthetic was applied before removal, as part of the experiment.
"Frozen to death"
After their eyestalks have been being pulled out, prawns tend to feed less (presumably due to impaired vision), notes a review of scientific literature published in 2024. It has also been observed that the offspring of such prawns are more vulnerable to infections, which are very common in aquaculture facilities—10 out of the 11 infections that can be contracted by crustaceans are regularly identified on farms—according to a report by the NGO Rethink Priorities in 2023. In a substantial report coordinated by the prestigious London School of Economics, researchers concluded that all decapods (an order that includes prawns, crabs, lobsters, etc.) should be considered sentient beings. As such, they argue that eyestalk removal should be banned, as should killing by immersion in an iced-water bath (which remains the norm in prawn farming and the farming of other aquatic animals). "They are frozen to death for hours," says Kathy Hessler, Associate Dean of the Animal Law program at George Washington University Law School. "It's outrageous."
France: a long way from a ban
In the United Kingdom, the publication of this report led, in 2021, to the legal recognition of all decapods and cephalopods (such as octopuses) as "sentient" beings. Since then, eight British supermarket chains have committed to no longer selling prawns from farms that use eyestalk removal and slaughter by ice slurry methods.
France is still a long way from achieving this. The majority of large retailers (Lidl, Carrefour, E. Leclerc, U, Casino, Auchan, Metro, etc.) continue to sell such products, according to a survey conducted in October by the NGO International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW). "Consumers are completely unaware of this fact", says Justine Audemard, head of negotiations at the NGO. For the present, only the Mousquetaires group (Intermarché, Netto, etc.) has committed to ceasing eyestalk removal by January 2026. The multinational has also promised that by 2030, the prawns sold on its shelves will be electrically stunned before slaughter. Aldi, meanwhile, is hiding behind the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) label, which some of its products carry. This certification program gives the guarantee that "ASC" prawns will no longer be mutilated by 2031. In the organic sector, the removal of shrimp eyestalks has been banned since 2018. (...)
