Grandstand. This is no longer a science fiction scenario: the world’s first octopus breeding project is about to become a reality. A Spanish multinational, Nueva Pescanova, is indeed preparing to impose hell on these animals, which are nevertheless recognized as very intelligent and unsuited to promiscuity. The establishment of this type of breeding would also involve ever more fishing to feed these carnivorous animals.
It is much less costly and complicated to prevent a harmful practice from developing than to combat it afterwards. The European institutions must act now to prevent it from taking hold in Europe.
With the growing attention paid to farmed animals, the uses that generate the most unjustifiable suffering tend to decline. Some of these practices are old, such as so-called “traditional” hunting or live mutilation in farms, while others were deployed in the 1970s with industrial farming, such as that of hens in cages or the grinding male chicks from laying breeds. In a few generations, certain uses even go so far as to become symbols of identity, markers of terroirs or traditions.
Thus the bullfight, with killing imported from Spain in the arenas of Arles there is less than one hundred and fifty years old, for example, reached the rank of uninterrupted local tradition a hundred years later. However, the practices which aroused little opposition yesterday have accumulated over time an increasingly large discrepancy with the expectations of society, calling on political decision-makers to decide between the defense of economic interests and those of animals.
Abomination
Do not wait for a harmful practice to take root in a sector, for jobs to depend on it and for an economic lobby to defend it. However, the European authorities are slow to react against one of the worst abominations that industrial farming has ever produced: that of octopus.
Octopuses are very intelligent animals. We have strong scientific evidence their sentience, that is to say their ability to subjectively experience emotions and feelings such as joy, anxiety, boredom, excitement.
Their captivity in places too small to be explored, devoid of prey to hunt and objects to handle, induces a psychological distress leading to depression, anorexia or even eating their own limbs. Breeders are then obliged to bring them live prey, which poses other problems of mistreatment during the transport of animals caught and then moved to be devoured.
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