Ethics, Appetite, and the Intelligence
- Ocean Hoptimism
- Nov 6
- 6 min read
What We Owe to the Minds Beneath the Waves
A colleague recently sent us a photo from Madrid’s Mercado de San Miguel, one of those cathedral-like food halls where every counter gleams and every bite is a small act of art. Among towers of pastries, bright wedges of Manchego, and glistening fish on ice stood a single, striking centerpiece: pulpo a la brasa, grilled octopus tentacles skewered with potatoes and stacked like crimson ribbons of the deep. It was by far the largest offering at that stall… an unmistakable signal of appetite and popularity.
The World Economic Forum estimated in 2019 that of the estimated 350,000 ton annual wild octopus catch, two-thirds goes to Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea (a whole third of the global catch ends up in China) with European countries such as Spain and Italy increasingly importing octopus to meet demand. It’s hard not to be impressed. Harder still not to feel conflicted. Because just as our fascination with octopus cuisine reaches a global peak, science is telling a different story—one about intelligence, emotion, and sentience under the waves.
There are moments when science doesn’t just change what we know; it changes who we are. One of those moments arrived when researchers realized that the mind of an octopus isn’t alien at all. It’s familiar. Curious. Emotional. Problem-solving. Capable of joy, frustration, and fear.
And now, that revelation is colliding with something far older: the way people have lived with and from the ocean for generations. Across the tropics, small-scale fishers walk the shallows at low tide to gather octopus for food and income. These are not factory farms or luxury markets; they are families, tides, and traditions.
Between these two truths—animal sentience and human survival—lies a moral crossroads that conservation can no longer ignore.
The tension, of course, is appetite. What do we do when the very animals we’ve long treated as food reveal minds capable of wonder, play, and pain? The science forces a question that culture can’t easily digest: should intelligence, or sentience itself, redraw the moral boundary of what, and who, we eat?
The Human Shore
In southwestern Madagascar, octopus fishing isn’t a novelty protein. It’s dinner, dignity, and tradition. Women lead many of the harvests, wading through coral flats with hand-carved spears and deep ecological intuition.
Their communities manage rotating closures and traditional dina (rules) that keep the reefs alive. This is conservation as lived experience: unwritten, communal, and adaptive.
To erase these fisheries in the name of ethics would be to erase the people already practicing sustainability by necessity. But to ignore what science has revealed about octopus minds would be to slip back into an older form of arrogance. The question isn’t which truth wins. It’s how both survive.
The Moral Tide Turns
In 2021, the United Kingdom amended its Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill to formally recognize octopuses, crabs, and lobsters as sentient beings. That decision followed decades of research showing that octopuses can recognize individual humans, navigate mazes, play, solve puzzles, and perhaps even dream.
Scientific American once called them “the closest thing we have to meeting an alien intelligence.” But if they are feeling beings, every trap, spear, and tank is no longer just an act of harvest, it’s an act between two aware minds. And that changes everything.
The Paradox of Sentience and Appetite
Some argue that sentience alone should remove octopuses from the menu. But humanity’s history tells a more complicated story.
We have long eaten animals we know to be intelligent and emotional—pigs that play and grieve, cows that form social bonds, chickens that recognize faces and hierarchies. Over time, we’ve tried to lessen their suffering. The industrial farms of a century ago (mud pens, wire cages, no oversight) have given way, however imperfectly, to welfare laws, veterinary standards, and the idea that even food animals deserve some measure of dignity and suffering should be minimized.
And yet, the story doesn’t end there. Around the world, a countercurrent grows: people who are walking away from animal protein altogether, moved by ethics or by climate science. Livestock farming contributes nearly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and shifting toward plant-forward diets is now recognized as one of the fastest ways to cool the planet.
So we find ourselves in a strange duality. We have learned to make suffering smaller, even as many now seek to end it entirely. Progress, it seems, moves not in straight lines but in widening circles of compassion.
The Price of a Mind
Industrial aquaculture exists for one reason: price.
A market trained to expect seafood at supermarket margins will always seek the cheapest way to meet demand. Industrial farming promises control (of yield, of seasonality, of profit) and hides its true costs behind efficiency metrics.
If we were honest about those externalities—carbon output, energy use, wastewater, habitat loss, and suffering—the real cost of a pound of octopus would be closer to fine caviar than calamari. Back at the Mercado de San Miguel, those grilled pulpo and potato skewers were selling for €11.90 (about US$13.73). We simply don’t pay the moral or ecological bill.
That gap has consequences. The same global supply chains that sell us “affordable” seafood also depress the earnings of the fishers who harvest it. Communities in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Mexico receive only a fraction of what the market value of octopus would be if sustainability and equity were priced in. The global demand for octopus has also resulted in scarcity of supply: it's simply harder to find as many wild octopus as it was in the past. You might think this scarcity would be reflected in significantly higher costs to consumer, but it's the fishers who take the hit (in wages) rather than the consumer.
We should, in fact, be paying more for octopus. Not as indulgence, but as accountability. A higher price that reflects ethical sourcing, verified sustainability, and a living wage for the fishers is not elitist; it’s honest. Imagine if every skewer of pulpo bore a label not of origin alone but of intention—“wild-caught by community cooperatives; no factory farming; profit-shared at source.”
If we valued seafood that way, we wouldn’t need to debate whether it belongs on the plate. The ethics would already be baked into the price.
When Conservation and Compassion Diverge
Conservation asks: Will the species survive?
Ethics asks: How does the individual experience that survival?
A reef can glitter with life even as individual octopuses live out short, anxious existences. A policy can safeguard biodiversity while eroding the wellbeing of the people bound to it. Our measures of success often forget what it feels like to survive.
Neither question is wrong. But neither is sufficient on its own. The next generation of ocean ethics must bridge that divide: ensuring ecosystems thrive and that both human and animal lives retain dignity within them.
The Line We Must Draw
There is, however, one moral frontier that cannot be blurred.
Plans for industrial octopus farms—in Spain, Japan, and elsewhere—envision solitary, intelligent animals confined to crowded, sterile tanks for mass production. Scientists have warned such systems would be “an ethical and ecological disaster”.
Octopuses are solitary and stress-sensitive; captivity in crowded tanks dulls their color, appetite, and personality. To industrialize their suffering for profit is not progress; it’s a failure of imagination. Rejecting factory farming isn’t cultural elitism; it’s moral evolution.
Justice Between Shores
Most calls to ban octopus consumption originate in the Global North, while the people whose lives depend on it live in the Global South. When moral language travels without context, it can become colonial again, this time draped in the flag of compassion.
True justice must make room for both empathy and equity. If we ask a Malagasy fisher to stop catching octopus, what alternative do we offer? If we celebrate sentience but ignore subsistence, what kind of empathy is that?
Ethics cannot come at the expense of survival.
Toward Co-Sentient Conservation
Perhaps the way forward begins with humility and solidarity:
Protect community-run fisheries. Support local stewardship models that unite traditional knowledge and marine science. And ensure a wage that supports this stewardship and management.
Oppose factory farming. Industrializing a sentient species crosses both ecological and moral lines.
Pay the true price. Support certification and direct-trade programs that guarantee fair pay, sustainability, and transparency. Ethical seafood should cost more because it honors more.
Reduce luxury consumption. In wealthy nations, octopus is a novelty dish. Eating less of it—while supporting small-scale sustainable fisheries—lightens both conscience and carbon.
Legislate for feeling. Extend animal-sentience protections to marine invertebrates, following the UK’s model.
Tell stories that widen empathy. Share the intertwined lives of coastal fishers and the octopus minds they know so well. Both are teachers in their own way.
What the Octopus Teaches
Perhaps the octopus, with its distributed brain and shape-shifting form, is here to remind us that intelligence is not singular and morality is not species-bound. We can protect people and honor the other minds that share their seas.
When we look again at that photo from Madrid—those mounded skewers of pulpo a la brasa—it’s impossible not to feel both awe and unease. The beauty of the food, the brilliance of the creature, the weight of the choice.
The question isn’t whether octopuses think like us. It’s whether our ethics can stretch wide enough to include them.
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