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?