Animal Welfare Observatory
Farmed Fish and Shrimp Welfare
AWO's farmed fish and shrimp welfare program reduces the suffering of farmed fish and shrimp by persuading producers, retailers, and policymakers to adopt and mandate humane stunning and welfare standards through corporate engagement, public advocacy, and institutional outreach.
What problem is Animal Welfare Observatory working on?
Farmed animals such as chickens, hens, fishes, and shrimps suffer severely within industrial food systems that confine billions of individuals every year. These systems operate largely out of public sight, allowing corporations to externalise the moral and welfare costs of intensive production and to avoid implementing meaningful improvements. Spain’s strategic position compounds this problem: it is the second-largest chicken meat producer in the EU, a major aquaculture country and one of Europe’s largest shrimp-consuming markets. Given Spain’s central role in EU food production and imports, progress—or stagnation—in its supply chains can shape welfare expectations and regulatory momentum across Europe.
What does Animal Welfare Observatory do?
Animal Welfare Observatory (AWO) works to reduce animal suffering through a combination of undercover investigations, corporate outreach, accountability mechanisms, public pressure, and policy advocacy. Its programs focus on improving broiler chicken welfare through implementation of the European Chicken Commitment (Better Chicken Commitment), accelerating the transition to cage-free systems for egg-laying hens (Cage-Free Egg Report – Global), and securing higher welfare practices for farmed fishes. In 2025, AWO expanded this work to shrimp welfare, beginning by mapping supply chains and gathering evidence on welfare risks in Spain.
AWO persuades large retailers and producers to adopt stronger animal welfare standards and then monitors and reinforces progress to prevent backsliding. It also engages Spanish and EU institutions to push for long-term regulatory change, including co-authoring Spain’s first national fish welfare guidelines (APROMAR – Guía de Bienestar Animal en Acuicultura). Through this integrated approach—linking scientific evidence, corporate accountability, and policy engagement—AWO helps shift industry norms across Spain and the European Union, generating lasting welfare improvements for millions of chickens, hens, fishes, and shrimps each year.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.