Why Not Save the Shrimp?

Though Joy Williams makes some very compelling points throughout her piece, Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp, the part that I found most profound and thought-provoking was the title.  One of the main reasons that this title is so intriguing to me is because of it's ambiguity. What is so unique about it is that the more I think about it, the more I find possible meanings manifesting in my head.

One who looks at this title more literally might say that it is making a statement on how society treats animals based on their usefulness to us. People have always been sympathetic towards whales and very eager to save them, not for any particular reason other that the fact that we really have no practical use for them. We just figured we might as well save them since there's no reason to kill them, and it really wouldn't be a hassle to save them because we aren't hunting them in the first place. Shrimp on the other hand are "more common on menus than chicken." People don't think twice about killing large quantities of shrimp at a time because they are such an integral part of our food culture. It would be way too big of an inconvenience to start trying to save the shrimp, so people would be much more comfortable "saving" something that American people aren't even hunting in the first place.

A figurative interpretation of this title would be that the "whales" mentioned here represent the government and big businesses that are destroying the environment, while the "shrimp" represent the environmentalists and activists who have become powerless in the fight to preserve nature.  In this interpretation, the title is thought to be sarcastic, and could essentially be restated as: Help the government destroy the environment while the ones who are trying to save it should be forced to helplessly watch from the sidelines.