Poor pulpo

The mammoth of all classes of fish producers, Pescanova, has scrapped plans to set up a huge project for offshore breeding and harvesting pulpo. Cephalopods are a cornerstone of Spanish menus, from tender boiled octopus to various deep-fried and battered seafood dishes. With demand for pulpo remaining consistently high, seafood giant Pescanova came up with a novel idea: farm it. We eat farmed fish all the time, but not octopus, so why not? Because it is intelligent and has a brain for each of its eight arms. It has been filmed building little gardens on the sea bed. It can also open jars, but it is dredged up on hooks by small boats and they apparently are usually beaten to death (to make the meat tender), skinned alive and/or dropped into boiling water.

The company had apparently solved the extraordinarily difficult biological problem of closing the reproductive cycle of Octopus vulgaris in captivity, but by 2023, animal welfare followers had demonstrated outside the Spanish Congress and elsewhere, arguing that octopus farming posed serious animal-welfare and environmental problems. Pescanova withdrew its application last month, with animal welfare organisations describing the withdrawal as a ‘victory following NGO pressure.’

PETA celebrated the withdrawal, describing the proposed system as involving confinement and what it regarded as unacceptable suffering and slaughter. The issue isn’t simply “Should we farm an animal because it’s cute?” There is a serious scientific question about whether an animal capable of learning, remembering, solving problems and possibly experiencing conscious states can be bred, kept at very high densities in an industrial aquaculture system and processed. Researchers have finally acknowledged that the precise nature of their subjective experience remains uncertain.