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The older I get, the less I want anything sentient on my plate.
I wonder if its easier to grow octopus flesh vs meat. Meat has the issue of all the blood vessels and stuff, but my off the head take seems that octopus might avoid that sort of issue?
Octopus tentacles are semiautonomous
There'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 a…
Earlier 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.
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?
Like most animals, the slime molds have retained the primitive way of life of the eukaryotes, i.e. they have mobile cells that can hunt, catch and ingest other living beings.
The mushrooms, like the plants and a few other groups of eukaryotes, have reverted to a way of life similar with that of the bacteria, i.e. they have developed a rigid cellular wall, which protects their cells, but which prevents the movement of the cells, so they can no longer ingest anything else but small molecules, so in order to eat they must secrete into their environment enzymes that will digest their food outside their body, resulting in small molecules that can be absorbed.
Like most plants, most mushrooms cannot move, they achieve the equivalent of very slow movements by directed growth. The exceptions are the few carnivorous plants and the few carnivorous mushrooms, which have traps for their victims having a relatively fast action, caused by various kinds of springs.
The slime molds move around and catch and eat their prey, behaving like giant amoebae.
The eukaryotes with mobile cells, without cellular walls, have visible reactions to whatever they sense in their environment, e.g. by pursuing what they want or running away from whatever may be dangerous.
Those like the plants and the mushrooms are also likely to have various sensors, but any reactions are too slow to be perceptible at the human scale of time.
So the slime molds and various mobile unicellular eukaryotes, like the ciliates (some big ciliates are as big as some very small multicellular animals, like the rotifers, and there is little difference in behavior between them), can be considered as higher in a scale of sentience than the plants and the mushrooms.
The real problem is that nearly all seafood is unsustainable. Even when using euphemisms like 'farms' make us thing it's somewhat contained to one place and we just throw them some food pellets manufactured from vegetables in another factory. The reality of salmon farms for instance is that for every 1kg of farmed Salmon it takes 20kg of wild fish to feed them to maturity.
The older I get, the less I want anything sentient on my plate.
The older I get, the more I have the sense (both intuitively and through evidence) that I'm far more like the animals I've eaten than I am unlike them. That sense has become more and more attuned, and it has gotten to the point that I don't see animals as food anymore. They're just a different kind of people trying to survive. Since I don't actually need to eat them to survive, it seems akin to murder to consume them…
I am much more aligned, however, with sustainable harvesting (hunting) than industrial farming these days. There is nothing natural about the modern slaughterhouse.
This sounds like the setup for a horror movie. Deep Blue Sea, but octopi.
There'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 a…
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”
Master BRUNCH. Pulpo a la Gallega (Polbo á feira)
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…