They would eat you if they could/wanted.
World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
261–270 of 420 posts
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Octopus is a pretty great cooked food, not as a sashimi. In Korean cuisine, at least, you find it stir fried, with noodles, in rice bowls, in soups...all sorts of things. There's several different kinds commonly eaten, from very small bite-sized to ones where a tentacle has to be cut into several bite sized pieces. It's often kept live until cooked, a practice that ensures both freshness and offended Western sensibil…
> But Americans are largely people who consider seafood to start and stop at canned tuna so... That isn’t very accurate. Coastal Americans have had plenty of seafood to choose from, consider when they would serve lobsters to prisoners. Alaska is full of seafood to the point that it is a staple (and considering many of the Inuit communities who have been on that diet for thousands of years). Just because the customs a…
When you mention a quintessential US state I wouldn't arrive at Alaska or New Orleans
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lived in the Midwest US for years and this doesn't track with anyone I've ever met.
Meet more people? The gross statistics back it up. The average American eats about as much seafood as the average Russian, which is surprising considering one has ample fisheries and coastal areas and the other doesn't. Both countries are about mid-line per capita globally at something like 20-30 lbs (9-13 kg) per person per year (vs 60-80 pounds (27-36 kg) for countries like Korea, Japan, etc.) More detail, if you l…
Remove shrimp and canned tuna and the Americans are not even close anymore
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the…
What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either
If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?
You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.
If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you. I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or…
I think you're misplacing the reasoning for the pain argument as "they can't feel pain the same way mammals do" whereas the contending logical argument is actually "we should avoid eating plants for the same reason we should animals - that is, it would be against their desires". The plant reflex is an indication of the latter. Else you could easily ethically qualify meat eating that is limited to the consumption anim…
I see what you mean. I took it for granted that it's clear that sentience is a prerequisite to the capability of having desires. If someone did argue that plants have desires then I would question what they mean: either they're implying conscious preference of future states, desire predicated on sentience or they mean some metaphysical teleological conception of desire. The first two are mistakes, the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games.
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#266I used to do research at the Shedd Aquarium. After watching a particularly clever octopus defeat every attempt to prevent him leaving his enclosure at night, I am absolutely confident that, just like certain aquatic mammals such as Orca whales, that we only devalue their intelligence because they were unfortunate enough to not be in a situation where they could develop significant tool use and the cultural artifacts…
> I did not eat octopus prior to this but I became firmly in support of encouraging everyone to avoid eating octopus and related creatures after this experience. Not only do I think they're immensely intelligent animals, I am firmly convinced that this particular specimen was smarter than a number of humans that I have met. Where I live octopus is a very popular food, representative of our gastronomy. I love everythi…
I'm trying to cut meats out of my diet slowly. All seafood was easy as I was never that into it. Pig meat on the other hand... Bacon, Ham, Pork, etc. I knew that it had to go. So I started with that.
Currently I'm an opportunitarian. Chicken is the meat of choice if I can't handle the vegetarian option, otherwise beef. But pig and all seafood is gone from my diet. My hope is that plant-based or cultured meat improves to the point where I don't have these ethical dilemmas anymore. Until then I'll do my best.
I know it's not perfect but it's something. I think more people need to understand that eating and culture are hard to seperate and we need to accomodate that. Making meat a sometimes food is the first step.
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.
You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.
You (kind of) can by now. Killing male chickens after hatching is outlawed in Germany since the beginning of this year. From [1] it reads like Germany subsised research into preselecting female eggs and only hatching these ones.
This is still killing male chickens in some way, but arguably less gruesome than how the industry has dealt with male chickens before.
[1] https://www-bmel-de.translate.goog/DE/themen/tiere/tierschut...
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either
If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife? You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism. If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.
It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).
Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gonna go out on a limb (hah) and guess that his winning strategy 9/10 times was "squeeze through thing you didn't think he could squeeze through."
That's part of it but he had an ability to break locks and dismantle constructs with ease. I realized after a while he paid immense attention to how we installed every new addition to his habitat and then would seemingly aim to deconstruct our creations using the knowledge he picked up from our installation work. I truly am in awe of these creatures, especially after one of the long time Shedd workers told me that th…
This is fabulous.
It's clear from just watching video clips of them that it's not just about being able to squeeze through gaps. They evidently experience puzzles with an enthusiasm that is unusual even in puzzle-solving birds, can seemingly understand quite complex things like how to non-destructively unscrew bottle tops, and from what I can gather they are kind of obsessed with jars and containers?
As an untrained nerd I have often wondered if they have, due to the maximally prehensile nature of their bodies, a genuinely superhuman, volumetric cognition of 3D shape -- a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.
The lack of trial and error when you see some of these puzzles being solved suggests they might have a much better grasp of 3D shape interaction than adult humans.