Opening the World’s First Octopus Farm

A number of companies around the world have concluded that now is the time to establish the first commercial factory farms for octopus.  This looming ethical disaster appears to have a front-runner.  Nueva Pescanova (NP), based in the Canary Islands (part of Spain), intends to open in 2023.  There, an estimated 60,000 octopuses will be confined and slaughtered every year.  If successful, and profitable, one can expect firms employing similar methods of aquaculture to become widespread very quickly.

The inherent nature of these animals has made it very difficult to create the artificial environments necessary to breed and raise them.  It hasn’t been until recently that anyone’s been able to work out methods to do it on an industrial scale.  Unfortunately, legislative bodies have been caught unprepared, and currently there no laws to protect farmed octopuses in most countries – including Canada and the EU.  Nevertheless, efforts to develop the first of these farms have met with significant resistance from environmental and animal welfare groups around the world.  We can only hope these groups will have an impact before this horrific new industry gains a significant foothold.

Before we get into it, here is the single most important fact relating to our entire discourse on this topic.  Everything that we’ve learned about these fascinating animals makes it abundantly clear that they possess a remarkable intelligence, and will suffer immensely in captivity.  Their extraordinary level of awareness has been witnessed by anyone whose worked with them closely.  In the UK it even led to them being recognized as sentient “honorary vertebrates” through an amendment to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill.   This after experts reviewed more than 300 scientific papers and came to the conclusion that octopuses experience a range a emotions familiar to humans – everything from excitement, joy and pleasure, to worry, distress and pain.  The report’s authors further concluded that “high-welfare octopus farming [is] impossible” and that imports of farmed octopus should be banned. 

Nueva Pescanova may believe that they’ve solved the technical challenges to make octopus farming economically viable, but they don’t even pretend to have conquered the ethical challenges – beyond perhaps the suggestion that this will result in fewer octopuses being harvested from the wild.  When approached by the BBC, they’ve refused to reveal anything about the conditions octopuses will be kept in, what they’ll be fed, or even how they’ll be killed.   

There is currently no scientifically validated method for their humane slaughter, according to British-based Compassion in World Farming (CIWF).  Octopuses are also solitary and highly territorial, so if confined together in tanks, which is highly probable in an operation of this scale, they’re going to be combative, frequently injured, and may even start to eat each other.   To take an animal of this nature, with its large and complex brain, and to subject it to these conditions cannot be construed as anything but inhumane.  According to Dr Elena Lara, CIWF’s research manager, “These animals… are solitary, and very smart. So to put them in barren tanks with no cognitive stimulation, it’s wrong for them.”

It’s impossible that everyone involved in bringing this into existence – from those developing the methods of aquaculture to those providing the financing – is not aware of what science and popular culture has revealed about these animals in recent years.  What it demonstrates is that when there’s an opportunity for profit, someone, somewhere will be willing to do horrible things.  Be it running a drive-hunt in Taiji, or opening an octopus factory farm in Las Palmas, it’s inconceivable that you can be ignorant of the harm you’re inflicting on someone.  You’re much too close to the action for it to be otherwise.  Sadly, such people will always exist.

That leaves it to the vast majority of people involved in this sad story, whose offense is not callous indifference, but rather a lack of awareness of the harm we’re doing.  That means pushing ourselves to want to learn about the sources of what we put on our plates.  We have to care about what we eat, and to require that our choices are informed and within standards we’re prepared to live with.  Don’t let others decide for you the level of compassion that will be demonstrated to other species in your name.

All species deserve humane treatment from ours, but some require an especially high level of care, because the suffering and harm they’re able to experience covers a much broader range.  With the likely exception of only whales and dolphins, the octopus appears to be – by far – the most cognitively sophisticated animal in the sea.  

Should we decide to permit the development of large scale factory farms, it will be a signal that we are not concerned with restraining our exploitation of the seas and reigning it in to within sustainable boundaries.  It would mean that we don’t see ourselves as accountable to anything bigger than ourselves.  That our role is to dominate and rule the rest of the animal kingdom, without having to consider that other species can suffer, be negatively impacted, or experience awful things.

The issue of cetacean captivity has clearly demonstrated just how difficult and expensive it is to undo harm once it has become well-established.  Even if public sentiment were to shift 100% overnight, we would still be facing enormous challenges in dismantling the apparatus that keeps whales and dolphins enslaved, and doing right by those beings.  Now with octopus factory farming, a horror that doesn’t yet exist, why on Earth would we choose to introduce it to the world at the present time?  

Such a move is brutish and barbaric, completely out of step with where we need to go, and with how we define our relationships with the natural world.

We know we have amongst us bad people who do bad things.  But for the rest of us, whether or not we consciously choose to remain indifferent to this thing will tell us a lot about ourselves.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Jason, Canadian Cetacean Alliance