A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

Not trying to be a SJW but a drove an 18 wheeler for a year and would pick up meat from slaughter houses and the way they treat those animals is god forsakenly bad.They put hundreds of chickens in a room and spray water with electrical current into it. The cows would come in on trucks just terrified with the walls covered in their own feces. Not even going to get started on the conditions in which they are raised.

It made me really cut down on my meat eating and pay the extra for local farm raised meat.

Im not even against eating meat! I just think the mass industrialization of slaughter is messed up.

If you look at almost every menu though its like 90% meat so the amount of meat we consume on America is remarkable.

Capitalism is really good at hiding horrible abuse of people and animals behind a veneer of civilization and the abstraction of a blameless neutral currency.

I visited an experimental octopus farm in Hawaii once, expecting to come away feeling guilty about eating octopus since I had heard so much about how smart they are. It ended up having the opposite effect, since I learned that they only live 2 years and aren't social creatures. This is opposite of every other intelligent creature that we know of, and so I'm extremely skeptical of claims of their intelligence. They might show sophisticated behavior, but so do a lot of insects like ants and we know they aren't intelligent.

EDIT: sorry, when I say intelligent, I mean as intelligent as animals that we generally do not eat. I believe they are less intelligent than livestock, but can learn behaviors like most animals.

The older I get, the less I want anything sentient on my plate.

They are also great for finding out if a person is an extremist. Example, to find out if someone is infatuated with say Elon Musk. Just make the statement, "You know that an octopus has more brains than Elon Musk". Their emotions take hold and they will go off and as now they don't person so and so is smarter. Yet it is 100% true that an octopus as more brains than any living human. One for each tentacle and an main, 9 brains total. Where a human as one or two, depending whom you are speaking with. https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/your-gut-second-brain

They're probably smart enough that we could train them to farm each other. Split them into two groups, give them limited food, and make them duke it out in underwater coliseums. Winners get to raise the next generation, losers become sushi :(

Hell, attach some livestreaming, raise some money, sic a few LLMs on them... we can probably learn to talk to them in a decade, teach them to ride dolphins, then invite them onto land to manage other livestock, or fight on UFC...