The ethics of eating octopus

Should the undoubted intelligence of octopuses change the way we treat them? This question has been asked a lot of late because of the documentary My Octopus Teacher.

The film is about a year-long relationship between a man and an octopus, and it takes place in a kelp bed off South Africa. It celebrates the sensitivity, awareness and intelligence of the octopus.

That’s a difficult concept. Octopuses — octopi is wrong because it’s not Latin and octopodes is insufferably pedantic — are molluscs. That’s the same phylum as slugs and snails and cockles and mussels. In other words, intelligence is not restricted to our own phylum of chordates or back-boned animals. As flight independently evolved in birds, bats, insects and the extinct pterosaurs, so intelligence has evolved independently in at least two phyla. It’s not all about us.

There are more than 300 species of octopus. The giant Pacific octopus has a leg-span of 14 feet while the star-sucker pygmy octopus has one of an inch. They have the highest brain-to-body ratio of all invertebrates. Their nervous system gives limited autonomy to their eight arms: in other words, they are intelligent in a way that lies beyond easy imagining.

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Octopuses have adapted to live in several different ways: as bottom-dwellers, free-swimmers and coral-reef lurkers. They are predators: their eight arms surround a mouth with a powerful beak and they quieten their prey with poisonous saliva. The bite of the blue-ringed octopus can be fatal to humans. They are short-lived, six years at most. The male dies a few months after mating; the female after her eggs have hatched.

Octopuses are molluscs without shells. Their shell-lessness gives them mobility and flexibility, but it also makes them vulnerable. They need intelligence to make those traits work, and it has been demonstrated in controlled conditions.