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Final 12 months, California and Washington state banned farming octopuses for his or her meat, and payments have been launched in seven different states — plus the US Senate — to do the identical. Lawmakers in Chile and Spain are weighing a prohibition on farming them, too.

All this legislative exercise, and but there’s not a single octopus farm wherever on this planet.

The motion to ban octopus farming earlier than it begins — led by animal welfare activists, ocean conservationists, and anxious lecturers — is perhaps simple to dismiss as an answer in quest of an issue. On paper, farming them doesn’t even make sense: they’re wild, solitary, carnivorous, and cannibalistic; within the first two months of their lives they’re extremely fragile and the overwhelming majority die; and their urine accommodates excessive quantities of ammonia, which suggests no matter firm that farms them must cope with the ordeal of a whole lot of polluted water.

They’re additionally proficient escape artists.

These are all traits you actually don’t need in an animal you’re attempting to farm. But it surely hasn’t stopped the Spanish seafood large Nueva Pescanova from attempting to make large-scale octopus farming a factor with the intention to provide “premium worldwide markets,” just like the US, South Korea, and Japan, the place shopper demand for octopus meat is on the rise.

At the moment, enormous numbers of octopuses are already caught from the wild for use for meals. In 2023, over 350,000 metric tons of octopuses have been captured from the ocean, in keeping with the UN Meals and Agriculture Group, which totals properly over 100 million particular person animals. They’re sometimes caught in traps — which they mistake for pure shelter — after which killed utilizing a wide range of disturbing strategies, together with clubbing them within the head, stabbing their brains, or hanging them within the air to suffocate to loss of life.

However octopus catches have declined in some areas attributable to overfishing — and so, to create a extra dependable provide, Nueva Pescanova hopes to open its first octopus farm as quickly because it passes an environmental assessment. However to those that oppose octopus farming, the pursuit is impractical at finest, and morally atrocious at worst, given the animals’ complicated wants and spectacular cognitive skills. Octopuses can use instruments, resolve issues, and so they even wish to interact in play. Within the wild, their dwelling ranges span a number of acres the place they hunt, cover, and discover.

“This can be a solitary animal that requires a whole lot of stimulus…So placing it right into a confined setting that has excessive density with different [animals] creates immeasurable stress, produces aggression, produces excessive ranges of cannibalism,” Sophika Kostyniuk, an ecologist and managing director of the nonprofit Aquatic Life Institute, instructed me. “It’s simply completely unethical.”

The (im)practicalities of octopus farming

In 2019, Nueva Pescanova mentioned it had discovered find out how to elevate octopuses in captivity — that it may efficiently hatch octopus eggs, elevate them to maturity, and breed them for an additional technology. Farmed octopus meat could be on retailer cabinets by 2023, the corporate mentioned on the time. However its begin date stays unclear, as its proposed farm within the Canary Islands remains to be awaiting environmental assessment.

One other main Spanish seafood firm, Grupo Profand — which didn’t reply to an interview request for this story — and some college analysis facilities are additionally busy attempting to determine find out how to commercialize octopus farming.

In 2023, the nonprofit Eurogroup for Animals obtained Nueva Pescanova’s plans for its first octopus farm on the Canary Islands, which was first reported by the BBC. The paperwork revealed that the corporate deliberate to:

Each within the wild and in captivity, it’s not unusual for octopuses to show cannibalistic at excessive densities. However Nueva Pescanova has claimed it hasn’t noticed any cannibalism in its trials. That caught the eye of Jennifer Mather, an octopus knowledgeable and psychology professor on the College of Lethbridge, who believes octopuses can’t be economically nor humanely farmed. Mather instructed me she had requested Nueva Pescanova to ship her the information, which, she alleges, the corporate declined to supply.

“That makes my scientist alarm bells go off,” Mather mentioned. “Present me the proof, and within the case of a business enterprise, in the event that they don’t present me the proof, I think it’s as a result of the proof isn’t there.”

Nueva Pescanova declined an interview request for this story and didn’t reply to a query about Mather’s request for information. Over electronic mail, a spokesperson mentioned that “not a single case of cannibalism has been recorded in 5 generations of octopuses raised by Nueva Pescanova in aquaculture.”

Mather has different causes to suppose farming octopuses is just not possible. Octopuses are carnivores who’re “nuts about crabs,” she mentioned, however feeding them crabs, that are costly, is “economically not a good suggestion.” When you feed them fish pellets, which Nueva Pescanova has acknowledged it can, “they’ll eat them, however they are going to develop extra slowly and acquire much less weight,” Mather mentioned, which is a strike in opposition to the business viability of octopus farming.

However Nueva Pescanova’s plan states that its octopuses can rapidly attain a market weight of two.5 to three kilograms with a mortality fee of 10 to fifteen p.c.

The corporate has additionally argued that farming octopuses will assist preserve wild populations. Mather dismisses that declare, explaining that wild octopus populations are usually effective as a result of the business fishing business’s plundering of the oceans has killed off lots of the octopus’ predators, like sharks and huge fishes. Whereas octopus populations in Spanish waters have fallen in recent times attributable to overfishing, Nueva Pescanova’s conservation declare is doubtful; there’s little to no proof that fish farming has helped wild fish populations rebound.

Who needs octopus farming?

I wished to speak to somebody supportive of octopus farming, and since Nueva Pescanova and Grupo Profand wouldn’t speak to me, I reached out to Roger Villanueva.

A marine biologist on the Institut de Ciències del Mar, a part of the Spanish authorities’s nationwide analysis council, Villanueva has studied octopuses for many years — together with find out how to farm them. A pair months in the past, he co-authored a letter within the journal Marine Coverage arguing in opposition to a proposed ban on octopus farming within the US, calling for a “balanced strategy” to the problem. Over 100 of his friends signed it, too. (It’s price noting that his co-author on the letter consults for a Japanese quick meals chain that focuses on octopus dishes, and a number of other of the co-signers have affiliations with the seafood business, together with some with ties to Nueva Pescanova).

Once I spoke to Villanueva, he didn’t deny that there are some sensible obstacles that stand in the best way of commercializing octopus farming, although he believes they are often overcome. However he doesn’t agree with the welfare issues.

“The animals are clever,” he acknowledged, however in his view, farming them is just not essentially completely different from farming chickens or pigs — “animals that we [have used] as meals for a lot of, many 1000’s of years.” It’s an argument Nueva Pescanova has made, too. The motion to preemptively ban farming octopus, Villanueva instructed me, comes from a “sentimental perspective.”

However the truth that we farm chickens and pigs for meals isn’t actually an argument in favor of farming octopuses, contemplating how terribly farmed pigs and chickens are handled. What’s doubtless extra related is that octopuses possess so many traits and behaviors which can be incompatible with intensive farming: they’re solitary, however on farms, they’d be tightly packed into tanks with different octopuses. They like darkish shelters, however they might be subjected to occasional durations of fixed mild. They’re carnivorous hunters who could be compelled to subsist on artifical pellets. And their cognitive sophistication, plus how little we perceive about find out how to give them a superb life in captivity, may additional compound that struggling.

However Villanueva mentioned that farms can measure and enhance octopuses’ welfare in numerous methods, comparable to observing their appetites, checking cortisol ranges, and monitoring pores and skin coloration modifications, which might present perception into their moods. Farms can preserve good water high quality, preserve small and huge octopuses separate (to scale back cannibalism), and supply locations for them to cover and shelter, as they love to do within the wild — all issues that Nueva Pescanova says it can do.

“It’s not simple work” to make sure good welfare on octopus farms, Villanueva mentioned, nevertheless it’s potential if farms develop good requirements.

None of this, nonetheless, sits properly with Mather. “You are able to do all this stuff to determine whether or not they’re confused or not — the reply’s going to be, ‘Sure, they’re,’” Mather mentioned. “After which what do you do?”

Extra essentially, Mather mentioned, octopus farming denies octopuses the flexibility to be octopuses. “The liberty to specific species-typical habits is in some methods a very powerful welfare one,” she mentioned. It’s not nearly “surviving till anyone comes and slaughters you; it’s about, ‘Are we actually taking away the basics of an animal’s life?’”

The teachers are combating

The disagreements between Villanueva and Mather mirror a broader divide among the many scientists who research aquatic animals, and the sorts of questions they ask.

Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental science and coverage professor on the College of Miami, is main the educational cost in opposition to octopus farming, together with a letter in help of a US-wide ban that was signed by round 100 lecturers. She instructed me that a lot of the marine science analysis neighborhood goals to not defend oceans and assist wild animal populations thrive for their very own sake, however to “enhance [food] manufacturing, possibly make fisheries sustainable in order that they don’t kill themselves by completely over-exploiting” fish populations. “You actually have to consider [the field] as fully beholden to the business pursuits.”

Mather mentioned that many within the cephalopod analysis neighborhood — those that research octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and another animals — “are usually not essentially within the animals qua animals; they’re within the animals as topics,” she mentioned, of “exploitative enterprise.” (In a 2010 e-newsletter of the Cephalopod Worldwide Advisory Council — a corporation for cephalopod scientists — one member wrote that she was in search of a writer for a cephalopod cookbook, for which many fellow members had “contributed some fabulous recipes.”)

There’s an analogous dynamic at play within the tutorial fields that research animals farmed on land.

Nonetheless, whereas a big section of the cephalopod analysis neighborhood is concentrated on how octopuses can be utilized commercially, many inside it — and out of doors of it — are pushing to guard octopuses from struggling and exploitation.

Octopuses are utilized in experimental analysis by scientists in a spread of scientific fields, together with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and robotics. Within the Nineties, Mather helped get some fundamental welfare protections for cephalopods utilized in experiments in her dwelling nation of Canada; different international locations later adopted. By 2012, a bunch of outstanding neuroscientists declared that proof signifies that each one birds and mammals, “and lots of different creatures, together with octopuses,” possess the capability for consciousness.

And public curiosity in octopuses swelled in 2021, when the hit Netflix documentary My Octopus Trainer — which captivated audiences with a narrative of a human relationship with a wild octopus in South Africa — received the Oscar for finest documentary (Mather was a scientific adviser on the documentary). A 12 months later, the UK handed a legislation declaring that each one vertebrate animals and a few invertebrates — together with cephalopods — are sentient, and that future legal guidelines want to think about their welfare.

However the specter of octopus farming may pose a significant setback to this progress. And it reveals that there’s no level past which the industries that elevate animals for meals will suppose twice about how far they’re pushing the animals themselves. They’ll breed chickens to develop so massive they will’t stroll, simply to squeeze extra meat out of every fowl. They’ll cram salmon, who make epic migratory journeys within the wild, into small tanks. They’ll tightly pack solitary octopuses if it might probably assist them increase into new markets.

However Mather and a few of her welfare-minded colleagues need business to have a look at extra than simply revenue. “When it comes proper all the way down to it, find out how to make some huge cash shouldn’t be what we actually care about,” she mentioned. “We share this planet with the animals — all of the animals — and our fundamental orientation needs to be, ‘Are we caring?’”