The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
May he/she rest in peace.
Edit: Probably not the same octopus [1] but it made me nostalgic.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan_...
Do you even know that protesters and the diners are the same people?
Or did you mean that Seattle is a city with a politically diverse population?
and as a member of nwdiveclub (the local dive forum) I can say that they have zero problem discussing and participating in harvesting of ocean life.
This is a description of everywhere. The only thing Seattle has a monopoly on, is talking shit about Seattle (sorry Portland, we're stealing that one too).
You also fail to point out the real unique aspect of Seattle culture in your loop.
"Mayer stepped down, and others took the lectern to recite their prepared remarks, which failed to acknowledge that the threat had effectively just been neutralized. Eventually, Mike Racine stood to speak, representing the Washington Scuba Alliance, whose director of conservation, Scott Lundy, first posted Mayer’s photo online. “I did want to recognize that Dylan Mayer is here today. He and his family took a lot of heat over the last week for this legal taking of an octopus. Much of that heat is vitriolic in nature and inappropriate, and Dylan, just so you know, the Scuba Alliance regrets that, and we applaud you for being here,” Racine said. The room stood and clapped. Mayer, once a nemesis of the giant Pacific octopus, had suddenly become its most visible supporter."
I don't know a single city filled with people which, when presented with new information responds so positively. Seattle reacts quickly, information spreads quickly here, but people are also very open minded. More-so than anywhere else I've lived.
Save your lamenting for the industrial-scale mechanized harvest of creatures. His grilled octopus (or whatever he did with it) was orders of magnitude more ethical than that burger you're about to eat.
No more of an ethical issue than using an IDE vs typing in the raw binary with your "0" and "1" keys.
I occasionally daydream about hacking up an electronic waterproof octopus toy, kind of like an underwater "bop it" that I can customise as they learn new features on it.
It makes me sad to read about any of these animals being hunted. They're too cool, leave them alone.
http://io9.com/5626679/three-arguments-for-the-consciousness...
They are, somehow, born with their intelligence. Everything else learns it, all the species you mentioned learn from their parents or surrogates.
Octopus are also a K selected species, laying 200,000 eggs on average. Furthermore, they are short lived in comparison to any other intelligent species.
We associate intelligence with individuality and hence with rarity: each human intelligence is rare because it was cultivated, not born. Octopus aren't like that.
If not, frown.
Otherwise, fascinating points! My day disappeared to Wikipedia thanks to you :-)
I'm not sure how to answer that question myself... but a lot of comments thus far say something like "they are intelligent so leave them alone."
On the other hand, if an animal is ugly or stupid or abundant, like spiders or cockroaches or deer or (I can't think of an example of a stupid animal) then it's okay to exterminate/hunt/harvest/kill them.
I'm just curious what line of reasoning or criteria that lead to "dog: awesome, do not abuse! Michael Vick is a monster", "pig: edible", "spider: kill on sight", etc.
Is it attractiveness? Perceived benefit to our own species?
I value living things because I'm a chronic Myers Briggs "Feeler" - I put myself in the other things' shoes way too much for my own good, including things like octopuses and pigs. It's much harder for insects because their neural circuitry is so much simpler, but I still try and avoid killing them needlessly.
Then again, I'm not strictly a vegetarian (I eat meat rarely). It's interesting to see how people reason these things - like, for example, at my job there are lots of dog-lovers, but they won't hesitate to kill an ant or spider.
I grew up on a farm, and have killed plenty of animals for food... But I don't see a reason to do so just because they're "annoying".
Hell, I've called the RSPCA to deal with brown snakes instead of killing them, and they will kill you ten times over if they decide to. /Shrugs
If it's not going to be eaten, and you're not about to die from it, then why kill any animal at all?
You had me concerned there for a moment until I figured out that you weren't talking about the "brown snakes" that are in North America.
As a digression -- they're prawns. Not shrimps. Never got that.
Joking aside, I'm very surprised that the teenager was able to escape a nine foot giant octopus. I'm sure he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of his life.
But seriously; if you're ever up in Seattle, despite the touristy nature, the aquarium is totally worth a peek. Watching the G.P.O (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaxG8AnTdE) in it's tank is marvelous; quite majestic creatures, despite absolutely being one of the things I would least like to encounter in the wild. Countless reports of them ripping off essential diving equipment.
In the video above, if you' watch the whole thing, the aquarium employee says "this one is about half full grown."
Interesting article though, it's always fascinating from a social sciences perspective how the perception of a concept can so quickly shift public policy.
The water line is kept lower these days.
We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous outrage. Why?
It's certainly not the bare fact that he killed an animal for food. That happens all the time, and people mostly don't care.
He ended up doing it in front of a crowd, but that's not the reason either. If he had killed, say, a trout in front of a crowd, nobody would really care.
Nor is it the kind of animal that he killed, not alone. If he had done it in private then told the public about what happened, there would have been no outcry.
Clearly it's some combination of the kind of animal and doing it in public. There's no particular reason either one should matter, though. There is, it appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that makes it a bad choice for food compared to other animals. But clearly it does matter.
I think it comes down to the simple fact that this was an unusual event. And though there was nothing specific about this event that should lead to outcry, the mere fact that it was unusual is enough. A lot of city dwellers are fundamentally uncomfortable with eating meat. Most of them still do it, but they hide behind the various structures that exist between the living animal and their dinner plate to kind of ignore it. I've heard of people seriously saying things like, "It's wrong to kill an animal for meat. You should just buy it from the grocery store." I'm sure most people are not that ignorant, but there's a similar sort of avoiding thinking about the stark reality of slaughtering and butchering.
So you have a bunch of people suddenly confronted with that which they try to ignore. Some of them are outraged by the mechanics of killing and eating an animal. But most of them still eat cows and pigs and chickens which are routinely killed in ways not really different from this. What reason could there be for their outrage, then? It can't be that they're outraged at the overall concept of killing an animal for food. But, ah hah! This is an unusual animal, so it must be that!
And that, I think, is how you end up with a conservation campaign for an animal that is not endangered and not, ultimately, all that special.
I could be way off, but it's interesting to think about.
If you do a search for Alki GPO, from before the harvest, you can find that there were many divers who were able to get their underwater photography hobbies started with a picture of that GPO. This particular GPO was about as tame as any GPO that I've personally seen in the Puget Sound. This gave new divers a chance to take their time trying to get their cameras setup, as well as getting multiple pictures.
Octopuses are intelligent. They are playful and awesome. You've seen the video of octopuses using coconut shells to hide in?
If we weren't so keen on describing things involving humans as "unnatural", I think the relationship between humans and livestock animals would generally be seen as symbiotic (much like ants who farm fungus).
But maybe they're inflating the pig's intelligence because they don't want people to eat pigs?
Then there's the "attractiveness" factor. If I killed a beautiful butterfly (heck, even if I extirpated a bed of tulips) I'd probably be labeled as a sociopath.
Which, of course, is why you should never smile at an angry dog.
But calling an animal's behavior intelligent or playful is only anthropomorphizing if we know that playing and intelligence are unique to humans. Which we don't.
This "dolphins play with bubble rings" video is ancient but great. Play is perhaps a tricky word, but still.
There comes a point when something is acting as if it is intelligent, or as if it has emotions, that it's reasonable to assume they are intelligent or they do have emotions. Not necessarily the same as ours, but on a spectrum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DoWdHOtlrk
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091214-octop...
> The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.
http://www.sefs.washington.edu/research.acl/Crows_and_Other_...
My father used to work with "looked after children" (Children in children's homes). He visited a home, and there was a boy there who had a pet crow. The boy had taught this crow some tricks, including holding a cigarette in its beak. (This would have been about 40 years ago.) My pa took a photo of the boy, and his pet crow, and the crow is "smoking". I have that photo still.
I think what I'm trying to say is that individuals have their own reasons for eating (or not eating) various animals, and so long as those people are not too preachy we can all get along. It is odd that societies tend to have differing views on acceptability of eating various animals - dogs are fine in some countries but not others, horse is tasty in France but weird in UK, Cows are sacred to some but delicious to others.
Dylan lives somewhere pretty far from that dive site and there are a lot of other places where he could have harvested an octo. Instead of doing so, he chose a most popular dive site around, place well known for people coming to look at octopuses, came there during the day and killed one of the creatures. When somewhat exasperated divers ask him "Dude, WTF?" he told them that he was in his right and suggested to mind their own business.
Imagine a park somewhere, where it is well known that deer come and interact with people. There is a family playing with a nice baby deer here and then a hunter shows up, walks right to the deer, who is not afraid of people and cuts bambi's throat, right in front of the family. Yes, he is within his right to do it, but he behaved like a dick.
That's what started a shitstorm, not a desire to stop harvest of Octos. There is a lot of them in Puget Sound and they are not in any danger and divers know this. Just don't be a jackass and butcher a Bambi in a petting zoo.
I think it's just social taboo.
Everyone defecates, and everyone is fine with that. However if you did that on a public beach, people would be outraged.
Also, if you beat up a cow, dog or bear with your bare hands on a beach, people would be outraged with that too.
I'm not sure that trying to come up with a "rational" way of looking at it makes sense. It makes people uncomfortable because it violates social norms.
You would have to frame the act in certain ways for people to be comfortable with it. If the Octopus was dangerous, for example. Or if you had some elaborate social ritual around killing it. Or if it was structured as your job, people knew you were going to do it humanely. Etc.
That said eating octopus and specifically the GPO is particularly unethical if you subscribe to intelligence being related to sentience. Additionally it appears that octpus legs contain brain cells, the part you eat is in part brain.
So how can you reconcile those two things?
I'd say that we meat-eaters are the ones who have to reconcile them.
Sure, they're nice creatures. If I had a choice, more often than not I would say let the thing be. But I also own a speargun and hunt on occasion. I like the sport, and it feels good to put your own skills on the table once in a awhile. What irritates me is how irrationally angry people get... it's an act of selfishness, a chance for a relatively passive person to stand up for something. It's not really about the octopus, it's about their beliefs. People have to stand for something... whether that's Obama or an Octopus, it doesn't really matter.
The cool thing about running a company, as I'm sure a lot of people here do, is how quickly you get to see the big picture on the world, and sit in the shoes of everyone else's perspective. Wearing a lot of hats and working on hard things really trains you to only give a shit about things that matter, things you can have an influence on, where the goal is not to change people's opinion subjectively, but to prove, objectively, that you can add value and earn a place on this planet.
This made me think about pandas. I'm not an expert in this at all, so please correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but it seems like the panda bear's evolutionary adaptation is that humans think they are cute. They rarely reproduce, sometimes roll over and kill their own young, and eat bamboo, which I believe they struggle to digest. But, humans love them, so they get lots of protection.
Furthermore, IIRC they are more reluctant to breed in captivity than in the wild, so being cute isn't exactly helping their population numbers like it would other animals.
Worth the read.
What he did will be considered the same as someone fishing for, let's say, trout.
I guess it depends a lot on the local culture.
Speaking as a vegetarian(!) I found the content of this article to be quite disturbing. Octopii are very special creatures and it is lamentable that this article is essentially what they taste like, how to butcher them and where to go to eat them.