Is creating octopus farms to rear them for food really a good idea?

Researchers and activists have been appalled by plans to farm the complex creatures, writes Sean T Smith

The ‘animal industrial complex’ raises numerous ethical questions, especially with regards to sentient creatures like octopuses (Getty/TheSP4N1SH)

Underestimate octopuses at your peril. In 1875, staff at the Brighton Aquarium were mystified by the disappearance of lump fish over several consecutive nights. Gradually, it dawned on them that, under cover of darkness, an octopus had been climbing in and helping himself to a midnight feast before returning to his own neighbouring tank in the morning.

Nowadays when Professor Peter Tse enters his laboratory at Dartmouth College, he often finds his octopuses “linking arms” over the tops of their partitioned tanks. As a professor of cognitive neuroscience, he explains that octopuses offer invaluable insights into how intelligent life emerged.

“If you hope to understand features like cognition and consciousness, you need to look at what evolution has come up with elsewhere,” he tells me. “Octopuses started out as a snail but evolved to become so very intelligent because of an evolutionary arms race. They’re so vulnerable because everyone in the ocean wants to eat them. That’s why they have to slink and hide and why they’ve become so cunning.”