SUPER LONG READ from the Globe and Mail Link but so worth it.
Copying full text (had to split it in parts) in case you can't get past the paywall.
Octopus are one of the most fascinating creatures out there.
Consider the octopus
Octopuses are smart in ways humans are only beginning to understand – just as companies are about to farm them from food on a much larger scale.May, 2019, Jennifer Mather, one of the world’s leading octopus researchers, travelled from her home in Lethbridge, Alta., to False Bay, South Africa. The producer of a new documentary, Craig Foster, who had been reading her research papers, sought her expert opinion on footage of an octopus he had been following for a year.
Over the course of 10 days, they played through clips in a studio in the director’s home overlooking the ocean. Dr. Mather saw the little octopus reaching out a delicate tentacle to inspect a human hand. Sprinting to its den, startled by sudden movement. Bouncing around with a school of fish – just, it seemed, for fun. For the University of Lethbridge professor, the scenes confirmed her long-held theory: “Octopuses live their whole lives on the edge between curiosity and fear.”
But then, Dr. Mather watched the octopus, trapped too far from the safety of her den and hunted by a hungry shark, execute a brave and ingenious strategy: She somehow managed to suction herself to the back of her most fearsome predator, while the shark swam around, befuddled by dinner’s sudden disappearance.
“I have never seen an octopus do that,” Dr. Mather says, the awe still electrifying her voice over Zoom from her university office this spring. ”What do we really know about the octopus? Nothing.”
The footage in South Africa became the film My Octopus Teacher, which won an Oscar. But long before an international audience was captivated by the movie’s charismatic star, Dr. Mather and her peers have been trying to crack the mystery of an animal that researchers like to say is the closest we may ever come to meeting an alien life form.
The octopus has already challenged our theories on evolution, intelligence and consciousness. It has proven itself smarter, more playful, more feeling than we ever imagined. You can devote decades to studying how and where the octopus lives and, as Dr. Mather will attest, still be surprised by what you learn.
Here is a creature, marvellously cunning and elegant, living in a space so vast and deep, so foreign to human experience, that we still mostly peer into the dark and wonder. Surely, such a creature is worthy of careful consideration?
“Yes, yes!” Dr. Mather says. “A thousand times, yes.”
And yet, no. We have plowed ahead, trying to tame the wildness of the octopus for our own ends. In many countries, including the United States (though not Canada, thanks to a small, prescient committee, including Dr. Mather, who advocated early for its welfare), the octopus can be used in experiments without standards and procedures to ensure its care. A Spanish company is pushing forward with plans to open the first commercial octopus farm in the Canary Islands; research continues apace in places such as Japan and Mexico to raise and domesticate the animal for profit.
Never mind that a loud and angry chorus of scientists, environmentalists and philosophers say that octopus farming can’t ethically – or humanely – be done. Last November, a London School of Economics study, funded by the British government, concluded that “high-welfare octopus farming is impossible.” A campaign to stop octopus farming continues in the European Union. Animal-welfare advocates in countries such as Britain and Canada are calling for a pre-emptive ban on the import of farmed octopus, to close the market doors before they open.
I never really thought much about the octopus, until I started seeing essays by scientists vehemently opposed to farming and began researching their objections for a story.
My favourite film version was not the Octopus vulgaris, or common octopus, of the Oscar-winning documentary, but the diaphanous cephalopod-like aliens, Abbott and Costello, who work so hard to communicate with Amy Adams in the movie Arrival to warn humans away from an apocalyptic future.
But the more I learned about the octopus, the more I fell in awe of it. The more outrage I felt about the idea of farming it, the more shame for my own species.
This was another example of us failing, yet again, to adopt the precautionary principle, to put the interests of an animal above our own, to avoid causing harm to a life we don’t fully understand.
The existence of the octopus makes you think differently, not just about eating and farming animals, but our relationship to them, our assumptions about them, and what this all says about us, the humans, languishing so pridefully on our animal kingdom throne.
Much like Abbott and Costello, what we learn from the octopus, our resident earthly alien, is really a warning to change our ways.
Humans have a long-standing bias for “cuddlies,” to use Dr. Mather’s nomenclature. We see furry mammals as smarter and cuter than slimy sea creatures, feel more morally responsible for their care, and apply more rules to their welfare. This doesn’t stop us from eating the cuddlies, of course. Or ignoring the fact that the pork chops and chicken drumsticks we buy in the grocery store begin with animals raised in often terrible conditions – a self-serving myopia that psychologists call the “meat paradox.”
But pretending that juicy steak wasn’t once a doe-eyed cow is, for many of us, a tolerable mind game. You’d probably be horrified, however, to boil a rabbit alive on the kitchen stove, the way we do lobsters. Or turn a pig inside out to kill it, which is how fished octopuses are sometimes dispatched.
That’s because, despite growing evidence to the contrary, it’s been convenient to assume that aquatic invertebrates aren’t sentient – that they don’t feel. An animal that doesn’t feel can’t experience pain. It doesn’t care if you hang it in the air and let it suffocate – another way that octopuses are sometimes killed. To paraphrase Kristin Andrews, a philosophy professor at York University and York Research Chair in Animal Minds, feelings in animals make the moral world more complicated.
So along comes the octopus, luminous ambassador to the underestimated invertebrate, to complicate our world. The LSE study found that the octopus, along with other cephalopod mollusks such as the squid and cuttlefish, and decapod crustaceans, such as lobster and crabs, should be considered sentient, and was thus entitled to animal-welfare protection. Freed from EU constraints after Brexit, the British Parliament passed a law making that official in April.
Sentience doesn’t require an animal to be self-aware. But it does open the door to levels and types of consciousness. Most experiments into animal sentience have tested for pain, but scientists are increasingly studying positive emotions as well. If an animal can feel pain, why can’t it feel joy?
In the LSE study, the octopus was the star; a team of researchers led by philosopher Jonathan Birch found “very high evidence of sentience.” Maybe that seems obvious if you’ve seen My Octopus Teacher, but in fact it’s a finding that further quashes some long-standing beliefs about invertebrates in general. Once we agree these animals have the capacity to feel, we are forced to consider their interests beyond conservation to include their ”psychological welfare,” as a pair of American philosophers argue in the journal Animal Sentience with a 2020 paper titled Minds Without Spines.
The octopus pokes holes in a few other anthropocentric theories. Charles Darwin described evolution as a tidy tree; scientists today argue it’s more like a thicket, with tangled branches of DNA. But in any event, the creature that would become the octopus hasn’t been found in our part of the thicket for more than 600 million years. Our last common ancestor was a primitive worm-like creature, and from there the octopus went its own way, in the darkness of the deep sea. That’s another reason the alien metaphor works: The octopus really did evolve in a different way, and on a different Earth than the one we know.
There’s a great line in Peter Godfrey-Smith’s thought-provoking 2016 book, Other Minds, that explores the octopus and the origins of consciousness: “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings,” he writes, “it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.”
And what a mind evolution built. The octopus didn’t just survive in a hostile environment. It thrived. For the past several decades, as Dr. Mather explains, the dominant theory of intelligence has been that animals get smart by navigating complex social interactions. Loners, she says, were assumed to have limited intelligence.
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