> News that the world's first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent "sentient" creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.
I really don't get the dismay. Sheep, cows, fish even, feel pain and probably feel emotions. So why stop now? It's such an arbitrary line.
Speaking personally, I wish we'd stopped sooner. I'm not here to say all meat is bad and everyone should be vegan, but I don't feel it's out of bounds to be dismayed that we're expanding the barbarity to new animals that clearly appear to have a form of higher intelligence.
I'm not the arbiter of truth on this, but I'm sad when I see pigs in factory farms, and I'm every bit as dismayed to see us expanding this to cephalopods just the same as if we expanded this to domestic canines.
Traditions (old habits + time passed) and rationalizing make people comfortable with eating most animals.
Then, it's easy to grow a conscience when confronted to trendy newish things like so-called sentient animals we never really ate before.
This is a good thing. Growing the masse's consciousness through new fads and phenomenons is a great way to create cognitive dissonance that contribute to changing old habits. Even if one will always encounter resistance to change.
However, the current consensus is that consciousness/sentience is a gradient. The higher the sentience, the higher the ability to experience (anything, including pain and emotions).
We believe humans to be more sentient than octopi, which are more sentient than cows, which are more sentient than fish, which are more sentient than yeast.
We might be wrong of course. It's probably impossible to even ever find out. But no one cares about hurting yeast.
Who is to say a plant does or doesn’t like getting ripped apart either? You can take this logic further and realize its all just culural biases. Life is life at the cellular level, we all have mitochondria and similar fundamental metabolisms. Yet when those cells become a complex organism we start to get a sense of bias toward complex life. Even more so when we start considering concious thought. All that being said its still just bias towards one specific niche of life, that of a multicellular organism with a human centric definition of thought or consciousness. I’m sure many a vegetarians still swat at flies without considering how ironic that is.
Fishes can be very intelligent in fact. Many are more clever than mammals of its same size for sure.
They can do basically anything that a bird does, but underwater, and also a lot of tricks that we can't do.
There is not a single bird or mammal crystal transparent, or electrical, or bioluminiscent, or that could change their color at will in seconds. If I remember correctly, the vertebrates with the biggest brain/body weight ratio, or the fastest movement registered, are fishes.
Imagine an ecosystem where living things don't eat eachother and live in full cooperation and harmony. No chance to ingest the biological building blocks created by other organisms. No evolutionary pressure to develop defenses or hunting strategies, etc...
Now ask yourself if the level of sentience that develops in this environment is satisfactory. Is there even a chance of developing thinking matter that can have a debate about ethics?
I recently read a sci-fi short story that describes an alien forest that has no predation, only vicious instant scavenging the moment something dies. The colonists wear light-suits to prevent brutal death because only the dead indigenous lifeforms create no light.
I really don't get the dismay. Sheep, cows, fish even, feel pain and probably feel emotions. So why stop now? It's such an arbitrary line.