The best way to save even more shrimps would be to campaign for and subsidize whaling. They are shrimp-mass-murdering machines. What's a few whales versus billions of shrimps?
You see this type of argument used against animal welfare all the time. At the end of the day, I dismiss them all as "we can't be perfect so we might as well do nothing".
As the article suggests, imagine you must live the lifetime of 1 million factory farmed shrimps. Would you then rather people quibble over whether we should hunt whales to extinction and ultimately do nothing (including never actually hunting whales to extinction to save you because they don't actually care about you), or would you rather they attempt to reduce your suffering in those millions of deaths as much as possible?
The trade off here is eliminating mutilation, going from Pain + Death to just Death, or in the case of the whales, going from Death to normal, beautiful shrimp Life. I don't really have any interest in doing shrimp quality of life math this morning but there's clearly something there.
In any case, I just wanted to point out that if you cared about the welfare of damn arthropods, you're going nowhere really fast.
Consider this: the quickest, surest, most efficient way and ONLY way to reduce all suffering on earth to nothing forever and ever is a good ole nuclear holocaust.
I said nothing about caring about arthropods. Side note, I do though, they are immensely important to our well being, without them we're not around, with them, we have trillions of dollars of mess to deal with. Again note that I said nothing about their feelings.
I feel you're still missing the point. I get you might be coming from a binary perspective, as evidenced by going to a nuclear argument, i.e. why bother talking about anything else, but I highly doubt that's the goal of the author. They are trying to make you imagine, and think, about how things fit together. YRMV.
As the article suggests, imagine you must live the lifetime of 1 million factory farmed shrimps. Would you then rather people quibble over whether we should hunt whales to extinction and ultimately do nothing (including never actually hunting whales to extinction to save you because they don't actually care about you), or would you rather they attempt to reduce your suffering in those millions of deaths as much as possible?