Maybe with a little butter and garlic.
This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn’t we feel some guilt about eating them?
I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However, it also commits the sin of lumping an extraordinarily diverse clade like the Cephalopoda into one poorly characterized gemisch. Yes, the Pacific octopus is a very clever beastie, but those schools of small, fast-breeding squid that get netted and chopped up for calamari? Not so much. The article makes a mistake comparable to highlighting the brilliance of Homo sapiens, and then arguing that we shouldn’t eat cows for fear of losing the next Shakespeare. If you want to make an ethical argument against the consumption of squid, that’s fair…but don’t do it by falsely concatenating all cephalopod species into an inaccurate classification of ‘smart, tool-using problem solvers’. It just isn’t true.
I also find this weird:
This evidence has so convinced officials on the Animal Procedures Committee (APC), the experimentation watchdog in the UK, that it has recommended to ministers that the law governing animal testing be amended so all cephalopods are given the same protection as animals.
So what have cephalopods been considered until now, mushrooms?
You should know animals have to be furry and cute-looking to deserve protection, unless they are in the whale family, in which case a big smile will do.
Thats just a typical journo mistake. The UK laws were recently ammended and cephalopods now enjoy the same protection as all *vertebrate* species when it comes to animal testing. However, I think this was in fact only applied to the octopus, and that squid, cuttlefish and nautilus were not included.
“How can you eat a genius?”
With mustard and pepper.
I have no problem eating a genius – they’re good for you.
Look at the beak. Obviously, squid are related to parrots.
The Independent’s science reporting is pretty bad. It’s one of the reasons I stopped reading the paper a long time ago. Of course it’s nothing like as bad as the reporting in the tabloids.
So does this mean ravens are off limits as well….?
http://www.feralintelligence.com/ravens-figure-it-out/
{militant carnivore}
Qualms about eating something that lives? How dare you! Everything that crawls, walks, flies, swims, slithers, or flagellates is lunch. Dammit even things that don’t are lunch. Honestly all this whining and hair shirt wearing means we might as well become breatharians. I want a large order of rare baby seal cooked in its own fear, served with a Yangtze river dolphin and coelocanth coulis, fresh wedges of kakapo and garnished with grated Siberian tiger penis and human foetus. To drink I’ll have a double jeroboam of champagne and the usual brown ales.
{/militant carnivore}
However, all the humour aside, no one has yet pointed out the fact that should a creationist eat calamari they are commiting and act normally reserved great whiite sharks and lions etc. I.e. consuming something vastly more intelligent than they are.
No but seriously folks, tip your waitress.
PZ, I’m surprised at you. For someone so active in rigorously examining illogical thought, I would have guessed you to be a vegetarian. With the overabundance available to a Western diet, meat is hardly something you need for health.
I can understand doing what you have to do to be a good biologist (i.e. Snowball)… but how do you disconnect that other part of you (remember Snoop, anyone?) when you sit down to eat hamburgers? (Or calamari, I suppose.)
I was discussing this subject some time ago with a friend who has very strong philosophical and theological ideas. He scornfully described the idea of not wanting to kill and eat smart critters, but he’s obscure enough that he didn’t bother to explain why. So: Anybody know why? I strongly suspect his position was at least influenced by his religious status, e.g. “Man has dominion over the Earth” or some such, but given the context of our conversation, I think he thought he had a philosophical position, too.
You are what you eat. I’m going to eat more geniuses.
As Tom Paxton sang, “Please don’t slay that potato…” just because “…that poor helpless spud, that you yanked from the mud…” isn’t cute.
Eat all the cephalopods you like. Cthulhu will return the favor.
Of course, he’ll eat all the people who don’t eat cephalopods, too, but that doesn’t have any sense of poetic justice.
After reading a couple of the posts you did a while back about octopus intelligence, and then doing some more research for a paper I wrote for a bio class, I decided to stop eating octopus. I’m not looking to change laws or anything, but personally I’d rather not be responsible for the death of a living, functioning, intelligent organism.
Squid (and cows, lambs, and various others) are a completely different matter.
rrt:
You are what you eat. Therefore, by eating smart things like dolphins, chimps and
octopodesoctopioctopissquid, you will become more smarter, and neo-Lamarkian evolution teaches us that this means your children will be even smarter still. So once you’ve started on this path, you should probably eat your babies, to make sure they don’t start believing in Science.Gah.
doesn’t work. pretend my three attempts to pluralise octopus were struck through.:(
Gah. <strike> doesn’t work. pretend my three attempts to pluralise octopus were struck through.
:(
Well, I would have felt guilty if I haven’t regularly eaten baby octopuses, sun-dried then grilled and served with olive oil and lemon. Ouzo is a must to accompany them.
Best tasting if you have catch and prepare them by yourself.
I “met” some octopi in highschool. We took a geektastic trip to a marine research facility and the had holding tanks for various critters.
I definitely got the impression that, like chimpanzees, when you make eye-contact with an octopus, “someone” is looking back. It’s not a primate intelligence, but it’s definitely a lot more “someone” than a cow or a horse.
The station had a open route to the sea in the lab, and the tanks had un-latched lids. The octopi could have left any time, but they knew the researchers brought tasty critters in and put them in the other tanks. The octopi had the run of the lab all night, and in the mornings, they’d be in their tanks and the tastiest critters were “missing.” Octopi are at least smart enough to spot a good situtation and stick around.
Pulpo a gallego…
Hey, it’s a bit like that old Lewis Frumkes book “How to Raise Your IQ By Eating Gifted Children”.
The morality of eating “smart” creatures is probably better cast in terms of the morality of eating self-aware creatures. Our perspective of intelligence in the animal kingdom seems to often be exaggerated when we find out a creature does something exceedingly well. The presence of self-awareness should be what gives us pause, because those creatures may then have a sense of morality and even hopes and expectations about the future. I admit I have no evidence that such animals exist, but chimps, dolphins and elephants have demonstrated some signs of self-awareness.
We tend to think of the kind of consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness that humans have as magically different than that of animals, like there is a kind of switch that has been flipped in us that puts our brains on an entirely different level than anything else. It might be the case that we are the only self-aware creatures, but there is no reason in general to cast the concept it in such a black and white way. Could there be a continuum of moral, self-aware beings from the ant up to humans? Surely even within humans there are gradations, and evolution must have presented many intermediate forms along the way. If so, should we treat non-humans in a way based on this? It becomes kind of messy.
But, but what about Oscar the octopus in Gravity’s Rainbow? “Out wiv the ol’ tentacle…”
Eating octopus is problematic for two reasons.
1) If we catch and kill only the dumbest ones, then we are speeding the evolution of smarter octos and hence bringing the cephalo-liberation army to fruition that much sooner (though I, for one, welcome our new octopus overlords).
2) If our efforts impact all octos equally independent of their animal IQ, then we are slowing the evolution of our new overlords, and hence interfering with FSM’s divine plan. You didn’t think that we are the ones made in the image of the noodly appendage, did you?
I’m not so sure that smartness has much to do with the morality of eating animals, per se. Farming them is another matter.
I have long made it my (decidedly unscientific) hobby to study (on the plate) vegetables and rank them according to IQ. Asparagus and brussels sprouts are by far the smartest. I find leaks, eggplant and portabello shrooms to be pretentious. By far the dumbest are squash and gourds. I haven’t made up my mind about okra and various legumes. I think they have possibilities but are perhaps just a little racist.
Once upon a time, in an island in the mid- Society Archipelago, I tried to hunt an octopus with a long bamboo stick. Hey, true, I had to find a lunch… But inbetween corals and small grey bluish ponds, it rocks!
I never caught it, but my legs and feet were bleeding at the end, so that I decided to go back and eat a coconut instead.
This is a true story, but even better, it has a deep philosophical meaning that perfectly suits this blog:
“If you can’t deal with the octopus, you’ll always find a nut”.
The legal point, I think, was that until the amendment there were essentially no restrictions on what you could do with cephalopods – the position was the same as that for graduate students, in JBS Haldane’s famous crack.
My introduction to dissection was in fifth grade science class. Mr. Bucich showed up with a big bucket of squid fresh from the Fishermen’s Wharf in Monterey, and proceeded to distribute them. After guiding us through the procedure, we were instructed to take the mantles up to the front where he had a plate of flour and an electric skillet waiting. A few minutes later my first taste of calarmari fritti started a love affair that lingers. Yum yum!
So does this mean ravens are off limits as well….?
Of course not. Ravens and crows are smart in a bad way. Their intelligence only makes them worthier adversaries, or something.
http://www.crowbusters.com/
As a cephalopod researcher, I must toss in my two cents.
I’m vegetarian, so I don’t eat cephs of any stripe. However, I think if you eat fish, you shouldn’t have any problem eating squid. As PZ points out, they probably aren’t very clever (although some of them — shallow-water species in particular — can do neat tricks that fish can’t do, most notably communicate via rapid color pattern changes).
Defining intelligence in general, of course, is pretty tough, and comparing species with vastly different ways of looking at the world and different effectors for interacting with that world gets pretty knotty. Is an octopus smarter than a fish? I think so. Is it smarter than a cat? If you could manage to devise a test that would simultaneously allow a fair comparison between a cat and an octopus and play to their intellectual strengths (assuming we even know what those are), then we might be able to address that question. Good luck with that.
FWIW: In my pre-vegetarian life, I ate squid. I don’t think I could’ve ever eaten an octopus.
FWIW, part 2: I’ve kept octopuses that I definitely thought were smarter than at least one of my cats.
Reminds me of a Futurama episode:
Bender: Who wants dolphin?
Leela: Dolphin? But dolphins are intelligent.
Bender: Not this one. He blew all his money on instant lottery tickets.
;)
I don’t see why intelligence per se ought to be an issue. Should we eat mentally retarded people?
The lumping part is interesting — we do this with dolphins too. A few species are very smart, others, pretty smart, still others down in the average monkey range.
Hey, it’s a bit like that old Lewis Frumkes book “How to Raise Your IQ By Eating Gifted Children”.
A comic from the Bay Area, “The Swami from Miami”, had a bit: “You are what you eat, so why be a vegetable? Instead, why not eat people who are smarter and better looking than you?”
Mmmm. Mentally retarded people.
We should eat all the cephalopods before they start taking our jobs. Only today I saw an advert asking for an invertebrate biologist.
Bob
This whole idea of intelligence being the criteria for not killing animals is just a pointless slippery slope introduced by Singer and I don’t buy it.
It’s BS, so here’s the hard and fast rule. If it’s human, it’s life is more valuable, because we’re humans dammit. And if we had to go through a billion years of evolution to get to where we can control nature, I don’t want to cede the high ground just because some sissies are feeling guilty about our evolutionary success.
I guess that makes me a horrible speciesist, but people seem to have forgotten in this world which has become so modified towards human comfort and convenience that we’ve been at war with nature for hundreds of millions of years. We don’t have to deal with the screw-worm anymore, or grizzly bears, or tetanus, or malaria (in North America), or death from infection of minor wounds, so we’ve come to believe we can commune with nature rather than live in opposition to it. Now we’re on top, and we struggled and killed to get here, we feel a little bit guilty (even though no other animal feels guilty about killing – especially to survive). This is silly, killing is natural, it’s what we do when we drive a car, build homes, study life, walk around, breathe, eat, and live. Hell our immune system is killing stuff for us all the time.
So, am I going to cry for all the bugs on my windshield or the occasional squirrel I run over? Should I feel guilty about killing spiders in my house or slapping mosqiutos trying to drink my blood? Am I going to go to pieces over the rats and mice that die as part of biological research? Nope. Nor am I going to cry for cows, mice, rats, monkeys, dogs, cats, cute little dolphins or even smart squid. It’s all about the humans baby.
Is an octopus smarter than a fish? I think so. Is it smarter than a cat?
My husband spotted a t-shirt at a street fair and made me buy it — it’s a Japanese-style cartoon of a cat and an octopus drinking sake together. So the connection may be closer than you think.
The average octopus is probably smarter than both of my cats, but my cats are particularly dumb. Crafty, but dumb.
Though not quite dumb enough to eat. ;-)
What total hypocrisy. Let loose a creationist in here, and PZ has to ask folks to tone down the high-and-mighty rhetoric whenever one of them sputters about how they “just feel good” about believing in god, or whatever…
And then I get to read practically the same BS when these same folks take a quick look at your own meat-eating nonsense lifestyles. Some choice quotes:
1) “If it’s human, it’s life is more valuable, because we’re humans dammit.”
2) “…animals have to be furry and cute-looking to deserve protection…”
3) “I want a large order of rare baby seal cooked in its own fear, served with a Yangtze river dolphin and coelocanth coulis, fresh wedges of kakapo and garnished with grated Siberian tiger penis and human foetus.”
Seriously. Take a step back. If you saw similar arguments (heck, these aren’t even arguments!) for creationism, you’d rip them to shreds. Pathetic.
In addition to being sometime ev bio major and dad of animal crazy kids, I am also scuba diver whose longtime favorite critter are octopi. I eat meat. I even will eat calamari. but never octopi. I don’t eat primates, whale or dolphin, or elephant either. steak and lamb chop yes.
“we shouldn’t eat cows for fear of losing the next Shakespeare.”
[Enter Romoo-o]
Romoo-o: Moooooooo! Moo Mooooo!
[Enter Mooliet above at a window]
Mooooooooooooo!
Mooliet: Moo!
[Exeunt]
-Excerpt from Romoo-o and Mooliet by Beef Baconspeare, greatest of the English Bovine playwrights
If they’re so smart, why do they live in igloos?
So what have cephalopods been considered until now, mushrooms?
wow, you mean they don’t have animal use protocols you have to fill out at Morris?
damn, that must be nice. i remember when i was a grad student at Berkeley the first couple of years that the animals use protocols were being implemented (of course, the whole issue of how the protocols came to be is an interesting story in and of itself, but it’s also long, so I’ll skip it).
only mammals were considered “animals” in the first year… then birds and reptiles the next, then fish…
get the picture?
I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus.
The idea that there’s something “morally” or “ethically” wrong with killing and eating sentient, intelligent beings is just as much a piece of superstitious religious woo-woo as the idea that there’s something wrong with killing an embryo. Moving the magic from “possession of a soul” to “complex electrical activity” doesn’t make it any less magic or religious in nature. It’s all belief in ghosts and invented metaphysical ideas like “morality”, “rights”, “the soul”, “karma”, and such like.
Basically, your objection (that you say you “should” have but don’t, conceded) would be merely that it would make you feel bad, which isn’t a moral or ethical objection, it’s just a statement about your own personal aesthetics. It’s exactly the same argument offered by those people who say you shouldn’t kill embryos because it makes them feel bad. “It sets off my own personal emotional triggers” is not a piece of logic.
PZ Myers: a deeply religious man, who doesn’t realize it.
El Christador, is the idea that I shouldn’t kill *you* just a personal aesthetic objection you might have?
El Christador, is the idea that I shouldn’t kill *you* just a personal aesthetic objection you might have?
Um, whose idea? Your idea, my idea? And define this word “should”. What happens if you do something you “shouldn’t” do? You go to hell? Frogs start falling from the sky? You feel bad? What do you mean by it?
There’s no doubt that I wouldn’t like it if you killed me, but that’s not the point at issue, is it? And yes, me not liking it would be just a personal preference. Doesn’t have any bearing on the “morality” or “ethics” of it. To say that it actually “is wrong” in any sense is religious mysticism.
There is a practical problem, that if I believed you might kill me, I might pre-emptively kill you to prevent it. Probably the best solution would be a truce that neither of us would kill the other.
But that’s not morality or ethics. That’s pragmatism. Or politics. It offers no reason at all why you shouldn’t kill those who wouldn’t kill you in self-defense. It offers no reason why we shouldn’t kill newborn babies if we feel like it, the severely retarded, or rather intelligent cephalopods who are still not intelligent enough to understand the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s akin to saying “Don’t pick fights with people bigger than you because you’ll get the crap beaten out of you.” It ain’t morality. Morality would be more like “Don’t pick fights with people smaller than you because it’s wrong.”
There are no logical or scientific grounds for anything like “morality” or “ethics”. I find it entertainiing how the PZMs of the world foam against irrational religion and turn around and do exactly the same thing.
I certainly don’t come here to troll around, I’m actually quite a happy reader of this blog. But El Christador has a good point, and he’s really hitting on some of the same issues I brought up– albeit from a bit of a different angle. It’s hypocrisy any way you look at it. I hope that the regular Pharyngula readers take some serious time to examine their thoughts, motivations, and logic about eating meat.
El Christador:
Value judgments are essentially irrational, yes. Your comments, however, seem rather to be grounded on a confusion between value judgments and facts.
Saying that killing a living being is wrong because it has a soul is ‘irrational’ because it’s a value judgment, but it’s also irrational because the value judgment is grounded on a concept that’s basically make believe (the possession of a soul.)
On the other hand, saying that killing a living being is wrong “because of the electrical activity in its brain” is irrational, being a value judgment, but it makes no fantastic claim about the material universe. Sentience and sapience are things the existence of which are not really in doubt.
“There are no logical or scientific grounds for anything like “morality” or “ethics”. I find it entertainiing how the PZMs of the world foam against irrational religion and turn around and do exactly the same thing.”
Morality and ethics are understood, by most scientific minded folk, as not being material things, but rather abstract concepts. Usually there are little claims that the basis of morality is scientific. Hence the saying that “science isn’t prescriptive”.
However, morality and ethics can be discussed logically, and with reference to a reality that actually exists and doesn’t run counter to science.
“Right and wrong are sickness of the mind” – Lao Tze
Morality is, or becomes, politics. If we want to build culture, decisions must be made that draw lines where no lines exist in nature. When faced with hard, and necessarily arbitrary, decisions, people tend to draw lines where none exist. What we “should” eat is a case in point.
“For someone so active in rigorously examining illogical thought, I would have guessed you to be a vegetarian. ”
Perhaps you would have guessed that because you aren’t adept at detecting illogical thought. Like
“With the overabundance available to a Western diet, meat is hardly something you need for health.”
which is what logical folks call a “strawman”.
We tend to think of the kind of consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness that humans have as magically different than that of animals, like there is a kind of switch that has been flipped in us that puts our brains on an entirely different level than anything else.
The switch is called “language”, which allows for symbolic thought.
However, such factors don’t establish what is moral; rather, it’s a matter of evolved psychology. People have very different attitudes towards seals and rats, butterflies and houseflies … even good looking people and ugly people.
The switch is called “language”, which allows for symbolic thought.
Do you count the small vocabularies and simple grammars that apes can learn to use with hand signs or keyboards? Even my cat can distinguish between the different meanings of about a dozen words (including pairs such as “food” and “treat” where she seems to see a much bigger distinction than I do).
You’re right that language is a huge part of self-awareness, but even language isn’t not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Sorry, I only see one preacher here.