There are many reasons why octopus farming should be opposed. Of all the cruel industrial forms of farming that humanity has visited upon our fellow animal species, at least we haven’t yet attempted octopus farming. The world’s first proposed octopus farm will change that, and there are many reasons why that is a very bad thing for octopuses and the environment. 

There has been strong global opposition to the proposed octopus farm being built in Spain. The group Compassion in World Farming produced a report to explain why octopus farming should not be attempted. The report states, amongst other things, that Octopus Farming would be an environmental disaster as well as a cruel operation. It would harm marine life in a variety of ways. The method of killing an octopus by putting it in cold water and inducing hypothermia is extremely questionable as a ‘humane” form of killing.

In fact, research from the UK on the sentience of cephalopods concludes that there is no humane way of farming them. The UK introduced laws which recognized their sentience, and the world has been waking up to the fact that cephalopods are extremely intelligent animals. Their difference from humans has been blinding us to their complex and nuanced intelligence, which involves a distributed form of intelligence with several “brains” in their limbs as well as their head. Recent documentaries like “My Octopus Teacher” have pulled back the veil on these fascinating creatures.

Decisions about how we protect animals are so often based on the extent to which they resemble us, or whether they serve us. Research increasingly shows that humans are still very much biased and uninformed about animal intelligence. We see evidence of our bias in favor of creatures like ourselves with large brains, as birds were judged to be less intelligent due to brain size, a theory that is being disproved. This joins growing evidence about the intelligence of animals like insects and bees.

It’s clear that the science concerning creatures other than ourselves reveals more about what we don’t know than what we do know. What it truly reveals is that our current approach to animal rights is based on narcissism rather than compassion, rationality and justice. 

The rules about who and what we can kill and exploit are arbitrary benchmarks that reveal more about how little we know than how much we know about animals. The accelerating pace of research about animal lives, intelligence and sociality is toppling these benchmarks to the point that they become absurd excuses for violence. The real conclusion is that, if we still know so little about animals, it provides less, not more justification for our cruelty towards them. Octopus farming will harm a creature that we know to be sentient and most experts have spoken out about it. What more do we need to know?

Please click on the link to sign the petition to stop octopus farming: https://www.drove.com/campaign/6202d5ca01cf365ea19492a3