The value of shrimp
Deary Diary,
If I had pet shrimp I might stop eating shrimp.
Pet cow, still I’d eat beef and dairy. I’d like to avoid eating my cow’s beef, but I would eat her dairy.
Pet chicken, still eat chicken and eggs. Again, I’d avoid eating my chicken, but I would eat her eggs.
I think it has to do with the size of a shrimp. I could eat a chicken over most of a week if I needed to, a cow over probably quite a few months. A shrimp would last 1 hr or less before I was really hungry again.That’s a lot of lives.
Same with blue crabs. You need to eat like 50 of those to get full. I guess there is a balance between the amount of meat you get from 1 life and the ethics in eating the animal.
The reason I think a pet shrimp would help, is cause I have had so little interaction with living shrimp and I haven’t learned to really understand how happy they might be in their lives. But in captivity it probably wouldn’t teach me much about it’s potential to be happy. I guess I’d need a massive tank for that pet shrimp and probably some mates and some friends and some delicious food. Then does the question becomes: where is the threshold in the cost and resources to keep something alive as relates to the length of time you could survive on it?
I think insurance companies ask questions similar to this all the time, with us humans as the subject.
