As Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher showed, these marvellous creatures are too intelligent to be factory farmed – Philip Lymbery

The mind of an octopus can be compared to a three-year-old child’s. Are we really going to trap them in barren tanks of water while they await slaughter for food?

Camera-shutter eyes blinked as tentacles waved like an elephant’s trunk. A pink, bulbous head formed the epicentre of a complexity of flesh waiting to make the next move. Yet, there was nowhere to go. It was a travesty of nature. An octopus trying to figure out why on earth they were trapped in a barren tank. A snapshot of something that should never be. An animal of the wide oceans now confined for farming’s new frontier.

Octopus are fascinating creatures suffused with nervousness and famed for their intelligence. The brain of an octopus has 500 million neurons, making them as smart as a dog or three-year-old child. But unlike us, an octopus’s neurons are arranged throughout their entire body. Curious problem-solvers, they have a long memory. They can remember how to open a screw-top jar months later. In captivity, they’ve been known to squirt keepers they don’t like and steal fish from adjacent tanks.

If that wasn’t enough to put anyone off farming them, then perhaps their appetite for other fish should make us think again. It means that captive rearing is far from a free lunch. It relies on catching wild fish to feed them. Which means taking three times more weight of fish from the ocean as feed than given back by the ‘end product’. So rather than protecting the oceans, farming octopus would put them under yet more pressure.

Octopus tend to live solitary lives but can sometimes form unexpected bonds with humans as shown in Netflix's My Octopus Teacher (Picture: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Stress and cannibalism

Yet, farming octopus is something now being seriously considered by some. Until recently, no one knew how to rear octopus in captivity past the larval stage. However, in 2019, Spanish seafood company, the Nueva Pescanova Group announced that they’d managed to rear them all the way to adulthood and even on to laying eggs in captivity.

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The company is now pursuing plans to build the first octopus farm in the Canary Islands, where it would reportedly produce about a million octopuses for food each year. Yet serious animal welfare and environmental concerns are leading to growing calls for a rethink.

Confining hundreds of octopuses together in tanks could lead to stress and cannibalism among these highly territorial creatures who normally lead solitary lives. There are fears that octopus farming could threaten dolphins and turtles whilst causing water pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. The plans in Spain come against the backdrop of an octopus farm having closed in Hawaii following a campaign by animal welfare environmental charity, Compassion in World Farming.

Why eating insects won't save the planet – Philip Lymbery

Award-winning Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher brought the sensitivities of these intelligent creatures to our living rooms. It showed South Africa-based filmmaker, Craig Foster exploring an underwater kelp forest where he befriended a curious young octopus. Foster described how the greatest lesson his octopus mentor taught him was that humans are part of the natural world around us, and not simply visitors.

And therein lies a lesson: that we should avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by bringing yet more species into degrading farm practices. That compassion, respect, and kinship should be at the forefront of how we treat the fellow creatures with whom we share this lonely planet.

Philip Lymbery is chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, a former UN Food Systems Champion and an award-winning author. His latest book is Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future. Philip is on Twitter/X @philip_ciwf