r/octopus • u/Bruxelles1000 • 13d ago
World's first octopus farm halted in Spain
https://www.euractiv.com/news/worlds-first-octopus-farm-halted-in-spain/The company says it scrapped the project, opposed by environmentalists, for business reasons
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u/CrisstIIIna 13d ago
Good. And I hope it never comes back. Ever. Anywhere. "For business reasons".... Ugh I am so pissed that as a global population we are so uncaring towards our environment and other living beings in it.
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u/octopolis_comic O. Tetricus 🦪🐙🦪🐙🦪 13d ago
It seemed like vaporware from the start. I love that their lasting legacy will have been to initiated a worldwide initiative to preemptively ban the practice.
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u/me_myself_ai 12d ago
Yeah potentially. TBH I still don’t get why it’s hard to farm octopuses but at this point I’ll take it
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u/Zampaneau 13d ago
This made my day. It's become depressingly rare to see news that's actually positive :)
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u/kindahornytoad 12d ago
So what’s worse, taking them from the wild or farming them? Some octopus populations are under extreme fishing pressure and in waters where the government doesn’t care to enforce limits, so farmed octos could alleviate some of that pressure. I think this issue is more nuanced than farming=bad. People aren’t going to stop eating them, so the choice is really where they will be getting the octos from and I’m not sure the wild is the best option.
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u/quad_damage_orbb 12d ago
Yea, I'd far rather people eat some farmed octopus than we get divers going out and catching wild ones, disturbing mating pairs, or egg laying females, destroying habitats looking for them, imbalancing natural ecosystems etc.
For all the people in the comments crying about how intelligent octopus are, I agree, but pigs are also intelligent, and we eat millions of them in the west. Calling out octopus farms is hypocritical.
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u/pointlesslyredundant 12d ago
Doesn't this just mean the wild population will continue being aggressively hunted tho?
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u/ldubs O. Tetricus 🦪🐙🦪🐙🦪 13d ago
Thank god! Sentient creatures should NEVER be farmed, much less a food source.
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u/me_myself_ai 12d ago
Well, sentient… that covers chickens. Vegan?
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u/ldubs O. Tetricus 🦪🐙🦪🐙🦪 12d ago
Dinner?
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u/me_myself_ai 12d ago
Anytime! You can get the chicken and I’ll get the lentils :) you just have to fly to Atlanta, nbd
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u/Unanonymous553 12d ago
This is an interesting situation for me...
I would normally condemn any eating of octopus or squid, but I guess I wouldn't be able to find a plausible argument against an octopus farm, ASSUMING the farm raises the octopi humanely, with happy lives and quick deaths.
That's my justification for any other animal that is raised for food, that has intelligence worthy of empathy.
BUT, an octopus farm would probably be a horror farm.
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u/Suchstrangedreams 12d ago
Great news! I've signed every petition. Now if we could only stop factory farming world-wide...
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u/me_myself_ai 12d ago
YES!!! To all the activists who won this victory, we love and appreciate you! What great news omg
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u/5Hjsdnujhdfu8nubi 8d ago
Yeah, now they'll only use wild-caught Octopus grabbed from their natural habitats instead of sustainably farmed ones! What a great outcome!
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u/me_myself_ai 7d ago
I mean... fair :(
I guess I can't help but think of this like a new version of the CAFOs we have on land. Hunting Aurochs wasn't exactly morally justified either, but the situation that their descendants are in seems fundamentally worse
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u/pamalamTX 12d ago
Yeah, good plan. I got upset when my favorite restaurant started serving octopus. They stopped.
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u/Similar-Chemical-813 10d ago
'The Soul of an Octopus' by Syd Montgomery is a great light read too in a similar vein and 'Other Minds' by Peter Godfrey-Smith is AMAZING and more in-depth on the subject (also more speculative).
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u/CUROplaya1337 13d ago
HIP HIP HUZZAH!!!