8 ms·
I used to love eating octopus, but since I've learned so much about their intelligence, I have not been able to bring myself to do so, anymore. I have the luxu
by ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I used to love eating octopus, but since I've learned so much about their intelligence, I have not been able to bring myself to do so, anymore.
I have the luxury of choice. There are many, in this world, that do not.
- Intralexical 2y agoI had a bit of tentacle float up in some seafood soup once. Felt like seeing a small severed finger, wrecked my appetite for that meal immediately.
- hagbard_c 2y agoThey only live for 3 years or so, just eat them when they're close to kicking the bucket. This short lifetime combined with their intelligence does raise the question how far an octopus could get if it were able to reach our age. Would they continue learning and adapting, leading to a race of superintelligent molluscs or would they plateau in their first year and just coast along?
- ceejayoz 2y agoAnyone who likes the sound of that should check out Adrian Tchaikovksy's Children of Time trilogy, particularly the second one.
- HelloMcFly 2y agoTypically octopuses produce offspring only near the end of their life, so eating them at any point is destructive for their reproduction and species health.
- hagbard_c 2y agoEat them after they reproduced then, they only do that once in their life.
- mellavora 2y agoexcept the mother has to care for her eggs until they hatch. So I guess we'd be fine only eating the males...
- HelloMcFly 2y agoThey typically die after reproducing. Mothers use their remaining energy to help their offspring survive, fathers sometimes do but not all - if you could somehow capture only post-mating male octopuses from species that don't sacrifice themselves for their offspring then sure, but that seems like an unrealistic expectation.
- timschmidt 2y agoSo is growing billions of genetic clones of that one perfect fruit, but you know...
- UncleOxidant 2y agoI suspect that would not be good eat'n. Female ocotopuses that have laid their eggs start to fall apart - you can see the skin peeling off of them. The females stay with the eggs until about when they're ready to hatch and then they just sort of go to pieces. The males, I suspect, suffer a similar fate after they've mated.
- kaxllca 2y agoA female octopus will try to eat the male octopus, so the intelligence is not at empathy or morality levels.
- ceejayoz 2y agoEmpathy/morality isn't necessarily a requirement for intelligence, nor are the definitions of either easy to nail down.
- webkike 2y agoOkay, but maybe they deserve it? Hard for me to tell since I’m not an octopus
- drooby 2y agoThe males die shortly after mating.. it's hypothesized that the males may even offer their body as nutrition...as a way to maximize their offspring's success. So this adds another layer of wtf. Doesn't really help moralize human behavior though.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoNaybe a way for sustainable farming? Breed octopuses, take the dead males who succesfully bred, and offer their meat with zero harm to the animal.
- micromacrofoot 2y agoare you sure? maybe they feel really bad about it after
- VoodooJuJu 2y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago> via things like divorce rape Touch grass.
- doctorhandshake 2y agoSame here
- nerdponx 2y agoConsider the intelligence of pigs as well. Even if cows, sheep, deer, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, et al. all sit below the "I don't want to eat you" cutoff point, pigs should probably be above it.
- jdhzzz 2y agoNot doing that is why future generations will loathe me and my generation.
- squigz 2y agoIf you're referring to not choosing to eat meat, I sort of doubt future generations will 'loathe' you - just as I don't 'loathe' members of previous generations who did things we've since learned better about.
- crooked-v 2y agoYeah, generally when you see historical figures talked about like that it's people who were standout bad and criticized even in their own times, like Christopher Columbus.
- dhosek 2y agoI’ve been able to give up eating cephalopods, but pigs are too delicious to give up.
- ep103 2y agoI try to eat meat to minimize the formula of: cruelty_cow = IntModifier * Animal_Intelligence /(AmountOfProvidedMeat/Deaths) * FrequencyOfEatingThisAnimal Solve for: Min (cruelty_cow + cruelty_pig + cruelty_octopus + ...) Where AmountOfProvidedMeat > NeededMeatForHealthyDiet And Cost * AmountOfProvidedMeat < Food_Budget I've generally found that maximizing on Fish, Chicken, and Cow (in that order) seems to be the best bet. I tend not to touch veal, lamb, or octopus.
- tessierashpool9 2y agojust because something is intelligent is no reason not to eat it imho
- colechristensen 2y agoThis is an honest question, I'm not making a joke. Why shouldn't we eat _you_ then?
- tessierashpool9 2y agowhile i do keep in shape and i'd certainly make for a juicy steak or filet, i doubt this culinary experience is worth ten years to life in prison.
- colechristensen 2y agoOk, one step up then, why should it be illegal?
- tessierashpool9 2y agoi find your questions a little funny as i had this sort of conversation already dozens of times and i know where this is coming from and where it's going. i mean i've been a vegetarian myself for more than a decade (am not anymore) and i took pleasure in leading people who initiated discussions around it ad absurdum. in germany there was a case of cannibalism many years ago where a guy known by the name Armin Meiwes slaughtered and ate another guy called Bernd-Jürgen Armando Brandes. never got the panic around it given that the whole deal was consensual. other than that you know yourself that society comes up with rules to ensure its stability and survival. eating each other wouldn't fly well from that perspective.
- colechristensen 2y agoYou could restate the golden rule as "treat others sufficiently like myself the way I'd like to be treated", not so long ago this wasn't applied to other humans who didn't look the same, but now it just seems reasonable to expand who the golden rule applies to beyond just species into... beings within a certain threshold of human intelligence. It is somewhat of a fundamental of morality, beings which are sufficiently intelligence deserve the same rights as I want for myself. If you remove intelligence (or something quite similar) as the criteria, what do you have instead?
- jjk166 2y agoI doubt there are many people in the world whose diets rely on eating octopuses. You'd need either an environment that had octopuses in abundance despite having little of everything else, or a selective method of fishing that primarily caught octopuses.
- diggan 2y ago> I doubt there are many people in the world whose diets rely on eating octopuses Probably right (about the relying part), but eating octopuses is fairly common around the Mediterranean, at least the West side of it. Most restaurants have at least one item on the menu involving octopuses in some form or shape./
- folmar 2y agoOctopuses are usually specifically fished [Cephalopods. Ecology and Fisheries, Peter Boyle, Paul Rodhouse. Chapter 16].
- rimeice 2y agoI know enough people who have made this exact same choice (myself included) for this to have its own name. Octoparian?
- vasco 2y agoYou should try Polvo à Lagareiro or Pulpo a la Gallega, life is too short to not eat good food.
- marliechiller 2y agoYou should try eating young children, life is too short to not eat good food. That's what that sounds like to someone that opts not to eat something on the basis of its intelligence
- drawkward 2y agowell, except for the switch to cannibalism.
- jjk166 2y agoThere are a lot of second order benefits to eating irish children, I think most would consider such a proposal modest.
- vasco 2y agoIf my parents and everyone around me for thousands of years ate young children and they all told me it was legal and tasty and good for you, I probably would. But since it's not it'd seem you're making a false equivalency from the top of your horse.
- Intralexical 2y agoWasn't this kinda the plot of The Giver? Not eating, but killing. It took them some work to undo the indoctrination. Middle-school me wasn't sure if that was right. But empathy is actually an involuntary instinct in most humans, and I think Lowry was right in that most people will find such things "evil" when faced with the its reality. Of course in real life there are places and situations where it is normalized to harm children. E.G. Currently unfolding with Sean Combs. But anybody outside those situations rightfully considers that disgusting and aberrant on finding out, and those inside it find ways to bury and rationalize their discomfort and end up traumatized for it instead of actually thinking it's good. Either way, analogy is not false equivalency. And neither are OP's moral decisions an indictment of your culinary preference, nor does your culinary preference have any bearing on OP's morally motivated decisions.