The kind of intelligence they possess is so different from our own that it’s difficult to make a direct comparison. It’s almost like comparing human intelligence to the emergent intelligence of an ant colony.
At any rate, my sense of guilt for eating octopuses is at least somewhat assuaged by the knowledge that octopuses eat octopuses all the time.
Honestly I’m a bit torn on this. Many animals can feel pain, and we eat them. Pigs are quite intelligent for example
I’ve struggled with my weight a lot, and a low carb diet with a relatively high amount of meat and other animal productas (eggs, fat, etc) is one of the few ways I can control my blood sugar (and thus, cravings to overeat).
Maybe it’s a little callous, but I’m inclined to eat what keeps me healthy and happy.
I don’t seek out octopus but if it’s being served I’m not going to turn it down. (I spent some time in Galicia for example, Pulpo Feira is a traditional dish)
Dear octopus eaters, please read The Soul Of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. Probably won’t change any minds here but at least when your nightmares are filled with tentacles of horror you can at least understand why you should have stuck with chicken.
I’m not sure the article makes a strong case for that. Obviously they don’t approach the hyperbolic, superhuman extremes that some people breathlessly attribute to them (see also: dolphins), but they still appear to be as smart as many mammals.
Why off the list? Would you stop eating cow if you thought it was Elsie? Well, of course SHE might have tasted like cardboard or paper or the vapid emptiness of an adman’s brain.
from that slate article:
And what about the classic research from the early 1990s, which suggested an octopus could learn to choose a colored ball just by watching other octopuses? That behavior, which helped make the octopus an “honorary vertebrate” for the purposes of British law, isn’t so extraordinary, even for invertebrates. Bumblebees, for example, can learn to choose between green and orange flowers after watching other bumblebees. Yet no one ever calls the bee “the genius of the garden.”
Game, set and match. Hope you’re prepared to eat some crow.
Well, by that logic, there is no reason NOT to turn Trump into tasty BBQ (altho, definitely leave the brain, spine, lungs, etc. out for fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy). Lord knows he’s already well marbled.
Quite a few mammals aren’t all that intelligent.
I mean octopi are petty damn intelligent compared to say fish. But they may not even be the most intelligent cephalopod. I think that crown goes to cuttlefish.
Needs Katsuobushi. Otherwise, yumm!!
Nah, corvids are too intelligent to be lunch.
All of this just makes me want to go vegetarian . . . .I just need the discipline to commit
I wish people who think pigs are intelligent had to watch them cannibalize each other - for no rmotive other than malice - as a child. There’s a reason farmers don’t think pigs make great pets. If they’re so smart, why do they have to give birth on special slotted floors so the piglets will drop through to safety, instead of being killed by the sow? Sometimes, she rolls over on them, and sometimes she eats them, mistaking them for afterbirth.
Eat all the pork you want, because they would definitely eat you!
Dying?
Best line of the day! 
Cannibalism is a nearly universal behavior among animals. In particular with mammals there are well understood ecological and evolutionary reasons behind it. Its a stress response. When resources are short its sometimes advantageous for the individual to recoup the lost calories from reproducing by eating the young rather than nourishing them. In domestication it can sometimes happen as a result of other forms of stress. And in some creatures (hamsters famously) simply become a default response to child birth.
Ascribing it to malice is anthropomorphising the pigs. They are not deciding to eat their young for luls. Its an instinctual response. And has nothing to do with intelligence level. In fact if pigs could decide to engage in infanticide because they’re evil. They’d be rated as more intelligent then they are.
Because factory farming. My grandfather raised pigs. As do many of my neighbors. That kind of shit is a rarity without the density and stresses of large scale production. And none of those people use slotted floors. Regular old fashioned pigsties.
May I suggest reading the whole article, instead of cherry-picking half a paragraph? It’s an interesting read.
Any reason you assume that (a) cannibals can’t be intelligent and (b) pigs feel malice when they do that? Your train of logic seems to be “I hate pigs, therefore they must be stupid.”
We weren’t a factory farm, either. At the most, we had about 40 pigs split up into five pens with less than ten pigs each pen for just that reason, but that was unusual. We usually had about 15 pigs in about three pens, and moved them around the edges of the farm to keep the enormous quantities of feces from building up…
The cannibalism out of malice I refer to was when I witnessed the pigs gang up on one pig of a smaller variety, repeatedly ramming the slightly smaller pig with their snouts until they knocked it down, then ripped open its belly with their canines and ate its guts while it was still alive. I asked my dad why they were so mean, and he said, “I don’t know, either. But now, you know why I tell you not to ever climb into the pen.” A few years later, he pointed out some bruises on a different group of pigs and demonstrated that they were the right elevation, size, and shape to be ‘snout punches’.
I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I was shorter than the top rail of the fence, and it was before we moved to the other side of the farm (away from the pigs!), so I had to be younger than ten.
