Spanish firm wants to kill one million octopuses a year | Hacker News Reader

Spanish firm wants to kill one million octopuses a year

businessinsider.com

24 pointsgbenga4real56 comments

However warm & fuzzy the current pop culture image of octopi might be - the reality is that they are very short-lived, and even in a (theoretical) completely human-free natural world, 99.9+% of young octopi will be eaten (by natural predators) before they reach adulthood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Lifecycle

Orthogonal to that - the article makes a huge deal of "plunge them alive into freezing water". Octopi are cold-blooded, and cold water is the natural habitat of many species. Does anyone know if cold is actually painful for octopi?

If the young human death rate was 99.9%, would that make killing adult humans okay?

If a human has cancer, and is going to die in a month, would that make killing that human okay?

I am sure the humans in the above examples would wish to live, and if we killed them, against their wishes, it would be murder.

I think those octopi - including the young who die - all wish to live; and that all creatures either behave to live (plants and bacteria, for exmaple) or, and the more so as their brains become more capable, have a specific and individual wish to live, be it purely instinctive, emotional, or with higher creatures such as elephants, dolphins and gorillas, an actual personal self-conscious wish to live.

Heartfelt...but the less like humans a creature is, the more that anthropomorphism starts to read like allegory, irony, sarcasm, or farce. (Admitting that vegans likely feel otherwise.)

Philosophically, you sound eager to campaign against octopi being eaten by humans. Do you similarly oppose octopi being eaten by the many non-human predators which currently do so? Those octopi also wish to live, do they not? Are humans somehow morally inferior to every fish in the seas (which freely partake of octopus), so that even 0.1% is forbidden to us?

I get your point, but I’m still not sold on the idea that this line of thinking justifies farming octopi in factory conditions by the millions.

Morally, I figure that the octopus factory will be roughly as horrible as the current generation of pig factory. Certainly no field of daisies. But not an Evil Demonic Nazi Temple of Genocide, either.

Probably closer to the latter than the former.

Nature is appalling, in that billions of creatures which wish very much to live are constantly killed and eaten by other creatures.

I would like for all creatures not to die violent deaths, but it's hardly a practical proposition. But I myself personally can do something about what I do, and so I do not eat food which would have to be killed.

I guess two counterpoints would be:

* people can choose to eat something else (arguably the veggies) but the fish can't, and

* the fish don't artificially breed the octopuses, they hunt them down in a "natural" process, which presumably keeps the balance in nature

I happened to not really like octopus meat too much so i don't have a horse in this race : )

My moral philosophy also amounts to "even if I try to be good, bad things will happen, so there's no point trying to be good."

Octopuses, or if you want the Greek plural: octopodes. "Octopi" is the Latin pluralisation of a Greek word.

There are times when I feel smarter because I knew enough to be able to make the error...

From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Usage_notes -

> Usage notes

> The plural octopi is hypercorrect, coming from the mistaken notion that the -us in octōpūs is a Latin second declension ending. The word is actually treated as a third declension noun in Latin. The plural octopodes (Latin: octōpodēs) follows the Ancient Greek plural, ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes). The plural octopii is based on an incorrect attempt to pluralise the word based on an incorrect assumption of its origin, and is rare and widely considered to be nonstandard.

> Sources differ on which plurals are acceptable: Fowler's Modern English Usage asserts that “the only acceptable plural in English is octopuses”, while Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries accept octopi as a plural form. The Oxford English Dictionary lists octopuses, octopi, and octopodes (the order reflecting decreasing frequency of use), stating that the last form is rare. The online Oxford dictionary states that the standard plural is octopuses, that octopodes is still occasionally used, and that octopi is incorrect.

> The term octopod (both octopods and octopodes can be found as the plural) is taken from the taxonomic order Octopoda but has no classical equivalent, and is not necessarily synonymous (it can encompass any member of that order). The uncountable use of octopus is usually reserved for octopus flesh consumed for food ("He ate too much octopus last night.").

Must feel good to be able to cite that you weren't just correct, but hypercorrect.

"I know enough to be dangerous" has some humorous bragging rights. But hypercorrect is actually not a favorable adjective - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hypercorrect

This was my one piece of knowledge for the day! Thanks for this!

I heard that freezing is the most humane way to kill fish etc.

Give them iphones, and we won’t be able to afford killing them, they’ll generate too much ad revenue.

Nah, that would be animal cruelty of the worse kind, for a such short-lived species

I find the whole idea of specific animals being an issue rather arbitrary. Some are more intelligent than others sure, but it strikes me very much as a spectrum with no obvious place to draw the line.

It can look arbitrary, but is usually cultural. Theory: With how zoonotic (animal-origin) diseases work, how many humans were historically killed by diseases, and the law of diminishing returns - there is a natural human bias toward only using a very small number of species as livestock. That bias is often expressed as "don't kill the [cute | harmless | clever] $Animal, which is not regarded as food in our culture".

This shit literally makes me want to cry.

Just don’t eat octopuses, please.

> Just don’t eat octopuses, please.

I don't see any difference between this and, say, kill cows.

Also, the news piece sounds too desperate in it's attempt to appeal to an irrational emotional response. The author goes to the ridiculous extent of claiming that

"the operator intends to kill [octopuses] by submerging them, alive, in freezing water."

I mean, isn't "being alive" a key precondition to kill an animal?

Octopuses have demonstrated significantly more intelligence than cows. It's one reason why dolphins and apes aren't generally consumed.

- https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

> Octopuses have demonstrated significantly more intelligence than cows.

I fail to see how this is has any relevance. The ethical or emotional argument of killing an animal does not depend on vague assertions over the problem-solving skills of said animal.

Meanwhile I feel your blend of arguments is terribly disingenuous for the way they avoid facing the fact that people eat animals in general and octopuses in particular.

Well, it's a typical dish in a Northwestern Spanish region, in Galicia, near Portugal. And as Galicia and Portugal share lots of culture, I think might eat octopi, too. Hard to tell to some people. Also, we are used to eat rabbits, too; something an American would see hard to understand, but I think the wild USA people eats lots of animals uncommon to us too. Maybe deers or something like that.

> Also, we are used to eat rabbits, too; something an American would see hard to understand

Rabbit can be found on many restaurant menus in the US and most major grocery stores have rabbit available for purchase.

I’ve never seen rabbit in a U.S. grocery store where I live, nor on the menu in any but some very ethnic Chinese restaurants.

Rabbit is usually in the frozen section where you also find duck. I currently live in Virginia but have lived in the south, northeast, and Midwest. Always been able to find rabbit in stores and on restaurant menus.

Out in the northwest, we don’t have duck in our grocery stores either. Maybe in the Chinese grocery stores, or Korean ones, but not in the standard run of the mill Americans ones. Our meat sections are kind of boring, and our frozen meat sections are minuscule. Actually, there is one item that actually contains rabbit meat that we can buy at our grocery store:

https://www.qfc.com/p/the-wild-bone-company-rabbit-bone-stew...

Rabbit jerky for dogs?

I make dishes with duck a few times a year and have done so for decades. When I have looked wherever I have lived I have been able to find it in the frozen specialty meat section of my local grocery store. Quite often rabbit either a full young rabbit or rabbit legs have been right by the duck. Frequently they are from D'ARTAGNAN. Usually it is duck breast and rabbit legs. If you weren't looking for them you would likely walk right passed them and not realize they were duck or rabbit.

I’m American and I have a hard time believing this. Many restaurant menus? Most major grocery stores? I don’t know where you live but this strikes me as bizarre.

Always been on some restaurant menus whereever in the country I have lived and been able to find it in the small specialty frozen meat sections many grocery stores have.

Ah, TIL. A lot of people in the US found that gross a few years ago.

This isn't something new in the last few years.

Used to? In Spain it is also common to eat rabbits (yes we also have them as pets). Is this not the norm in other countries??

Now that I think about it eating a species we also have as pets is strange...

Are used to != used to.

I'm not a native speaker, but shouldn't it be something like "are used to eating …" ?

You're absolutely correct.

It typically a traditional dish from those regions yes... but it is eaten all over Spain in very large quantities.

It depends; is not the usual dish you would get on weekends, but almost on special holydays or celebrations.

You convinced me. I will choose the Kosher two-weeks-old baby lamb instead.

We could be discussing it for a lot of time and thinking that this is a moral problem, but in fact is much more simple. This is commercial war

A half Chinese researcher criticizing a Spanish company for killing octopi? feels like a bad joke. Would be like Samsung claiming than using i-phones is immoral and we all should boycott it. There are more than hints of a conflict of interest here.

Spain invested more than a decade of research into learning how to breed octopuses. Most of it, failure after failure. The fact is that China is the main competitor in this market and would be --extremely happy-- to have this technology today, and exploit the market at much bigger scale. A solid clue is that this is published in "business insider" and not in "the friends of Kant".

Calling to boycott against competitors, while you earn some extra time to clone, copy, or develop the same techniques is a classic foul move, and the really immoral part here.

The problem is the factory farming, and the more people focus on methods of execution the more effective their PR is.

Factory farming is not a problem at all

What's the alternative to killing by freezing? Stabbing their brains?

Apparently you can anesthetize them with ethanol first, though I don't know how well that would scale.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-put-octopus-slee...

We shouldn't confuse killing an animal for research, and killing it for human food.

We don't embalm cows before eating them. Killing your seafood with ethanol, and therefore making it poisonous, would be extremely dumb.

They use a 1 to 3 percent strength ethanol solution. Also, when you say "poisonous" are you maybe thinking methanol? There's, uh, already pretty big business around getting people to ingest ethanol.

It does not matter. That procedure is a solution for a totally different type of problem. Keeping a sample of an animal in a jar in a museum for 20 years so you can do scientific research on it. The more toxic, the less attacked by bacteria or animals

Ethanol has one and only one purpose, and is critical. To avoid the body contracting while dying. This aspect is totally useless in the kitchen.

Or being hit to death against a hard surface. But this part, required to tender the meat, can be done also after the octopus is killed.

I mean what's a more humane alternative.

Only? The author really don't understands the scope of commercial fishing.

Better alternative title: A Spanish firm will pioneer an alternative and more human way to kill their captures. This is a good thing in my book

According to an expert, not more humane, but slow and painful.

That "expert" is wrong (or does not really understands how animal metabolism work).

Humans that live in the reality can easily grasp than being clubbed to death will be more painful than going sleep and dying for hypothermia.

Until an octopus is bagging my groceries I dgaf how many are murdered in cold blood.

They should build robot with AI to do it instead. There must be some sensible and implementable method there.

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