The older I get, the less I want anything sentient on my plate.
"Sentient" is ill-defined, you can apply it to almost anything you want. From its Latin ethnology it means: able to feel or perceive.
A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
71–80 of 212 posts
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
You bring up a good point about penguins. They and chickens are both birds, so why are we finally eating chickens but not penguins? Cuteness definitely plays a role.
Chickens have been domesticated a long time ago because they were around, flightless, and easy to breed. You won't even see a penguin until you reach high latitudes and they eat fish... Even if they both tasted good (which I have no idea) very obvious practical reasons would explain the difference.
That's the practicality for why thing are the way they are.
My argument is about starting up a baby penguin slaughterhouse in the north pole right now and how much activist resistance you will get versus a crocodile meat slaughter house in Florida.
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#73I 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 mi…
So the people farming Octopuses are not a reliable source of information about whether it's ok to farm them.
Call it a conflict of interest, if you may.
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really any different from any other animal? So why would it not have possibility to be on plate? After all one of my life bucket lists is to taste as many species as possible...
This is exactly why I don't want to eat them. As an animal, yes, I can identify that they are in fact like other animals; they are like me, for instance. I don't want to eat things like me, because I don't want to be eaten. That's why it's not possible to put a cat on my plate. That logic goes both ways, and the variables in the equation are values-based.
Funny because those cats and dogs would happily eat you. Not in a "cats eat their dead owners sense" but in the sense that dogs and cats are pretty un-discerning when they are hungry.
The real reason to not eat cats and dogs is that they are mediocre food
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is opposite of every other intelligent creature that we know of, and so I'm extremely skeptical of claims of their intelligence. Octopuses can demonstrably learn: scientists put food inside a pot with a lid and gave the pot to an octopus. If my memory doesn't fail me, in the first attempt the octopus took 2 hours to open the lid and in the second one it took 5 minutes.
Sorry, my use of "intelligent" here was imprecise. They can clearly learn, but seem much less intelligent than other animals that we commonly eat, and not anywhere close to the same level of intelligence of animals that we generally do not eat, such as great apes, elephants, and whales.
"intelligence" is a quite imprecise term. What do you mean by intelligence, can you define?
Is chatGPT intelligent?
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is opposite of every other intelligent creature that we know of, and so I'm extremely skeptical of claims of their intelligence. Octopuses can demonstrably learn: scientists put food inside a pot with a lid and gave the pot to an octopus. If my memory doesn't fail me, in the first attempt the octopus took 2 hours to open the lid and in the second one it took 5 minutes.
Sorry, my use of "intelligent" here was imprecise. They can clearly learn, but seem much less intelligent than other animals that we commonly eat, and not anywhere close to the same level of intelligence of animals that we generally do not eat, such as great apes, elephants, and whales.
Some octopus species use rudimentary tools, which would put them ahead of elephants and whales in at least that aspect.
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#77I 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 mi…
>This is opposite of every other intelligent creature that we know of, and so I'm extremely skeptical of claims of their intelligence. Octopuses can demonstrably learn: scientists put food inside a pot with a lid and gave the pot to an octopus. If my memory doesn't fail me, in the first attempt the octopus took 2 hours to open the lid and in the second one it took 5 minutes.
At that level, SLIME MOLD can "demonstrably learn", are you about to give up eating mushrooms because they show the ability for cells to adapt?
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#78I 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 mi…
I am not sure how smart they are, but since they have arms and are able to manipulate their environment (in human-like ways) to a degree that basically no other sea creature is capable of, they can come across as being far more intelligent than is possible for a fish for example. Every time I see a discussion of their intelligence they are doing something like opening a jar with food in it. Even a dolphin can’t do that, but that has more to do with anatomy than brainpower.
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#79There's something I don't really understand in this discussion, and though it looks like it's already been flagged, I suppose I'll try my luck anyway.
The question "is it ethical to farm octopus?" sounds to me a little like the question "should we allow primates to vote?". Obviously, we allow some primates to vote. "Octopus" does not describe a single species, or a single genus, or even a single family, but in fact an entire order of animals. "Primate", as you might recall, is also an order. I.e. we should expect the octopodans to be roughly as diverse, behaviorally and anatomically, as the primates.
So: what gives? How can we generalize the observations of one or two kinds of octopus to hundreds of distantly related species?
Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that
#80We know that octopuses and many other animals are intelligent. We don't know for certain if anything nonhuman is sentient. Scientists and activist groups have been designing frameworks for sentience and tests to measure it. This paper [1] (about crabs, but discusses octopuses) has a very interesting section talking about defining and measuring sentience. It was used to support a recent bill in the UK [2] attempting t…
Right. Maybe it is hard to prove, but the choice to eat them is a life-or-death decision. I am going to opt for tofu. Given that "sentience" is roughly the ability to have feelings, it seems very hard to believe most animals are not sentient. Spend a day with a cat or on a farm and you will witness emotions. Do octopuses have feelings? The paper is pretty confident: "There is very strong evidence of sentience in octopods". It seems likely to me that animals that are distant from humans are harder for us to understand, but still sentient.