Misleading title! For a moment, I thought a giant marine octopus is attacking Seattle.
Joking aside, I'm very surprised that the teenager was able to escape a nine foot giant octopus. I'm sure he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of his life.
My random conspiracy is that octopuses are actually alien life form that crashed into our oceans thousands of years ago.
But seriously; if you're ever up in Seattle, despite the touristy nature, the aquarium is totally worth a peek. Watching the G.P.O (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaxG8AnTdE) in it's tank is marvelous; quite majestic creatures, despite absolutely being one of the things I would least like to encounter in the wild. Countless reports of them ripping off essential diving equipment.
In the video above, if you' watch the whole thing, the aquarium employee says "this one is about half full grown."
Interesting article though, it's always fascinating from a social sciences perspective how the perception of a concept can so quickly shift public policy.
The Aquarium docents love to talk about their octopuses. If you get an older one, they'll tell you about the time when they filled the tank near the top and the octopus climbed out and flopped upon an unsuspecting visitor!
Coming soon: Braised Stephen Hawking on lightly buttered toast!
Speaking as a vegetarian(!) I found the content of this article to be quite disturbing. Octopii are very special creatures and it is lamentable that this article is essentially what they taste like, how to butcher them and where to go to eat them.
Speaking as a omnivore I found the content of this article to be quite useful. That said, Octopii are indeed very special creatures for many reasons one of which is they do in fact serve well as the main ingredient in multiple dishes.
Fellow vegetarian... honestly I find the thundering hypocrisy of store-goers who are offended by the grisly reality of hunting far more grotesque than the gastronomical details of the article.
iirc, Hawking no longer has the disease. That is, his disease only was actually "active" for about 5 years... it's just that the damage was irreversible. This is why he survived ALS when most people die of it.
There are a few animals I'd really like to have as pets, because of their intelligence. Obviously a dog, but also there are a couple of breeds of cat (aby, burmese, bengal,) plus grey parrots and an octopus. If I could get away with them, I'd also be up for dolphins. I wouldn't have space for a whale.
I occasionally daydream about hacking up an electronic waterproof octopus toy, kind of like an underwater "bop it" that I can customise as they learn new features on it.
It makes me sad to read about any of these animals being hunted. They're too cool, leave them alone.
They're super cool and ridiculously smart. Quite possibly among the smartest animals on the planet. (It's difficult to say how smart, exactly, because their neural anatomy evolved very different from the mammalian systems we've held up as the gold standard. But they meet certain indicating criteria that a lot of mammals fail.)
Cows are bred to be fat, and they don't need to outwit prey, so it is hard for them to show the fact that they are conscious intelligent animals as well.
While intelligent, octopus are dramatically different from other intelligent species.
They are, somehow, born with their intelligence. Everything else learns it, all the species you mentioned learn from their parents or surrogates.
Octopus are also a K selected species, laying 200,000 eggs on average. Furthermore, they are short lived in comparison to any other intelligent species.
We associate intelligence with individuality and hence with rarity: each human intelligence is rare because it was cultivated, not born. Octopus aren't like that.
I'm still not sure that it's ethical to kill human clones, just because they were born fully formed and with pre-programmed intelligence, and die anyway after a few years.
While I agree with your "leave them alone" sentiment, why can't that apply to all animals/sentient beings?
I'm not sure how to answer that question myself... but a lot of comments thus far say something like "they are intelligent so leave them alone."
On the other hand, if an animal is ugly or stupid or abundant, like spiders or cockroaches or deer or (I can't think of an example of a stupid animal) then it's okay to exterminate/hunt/harvest/kill them.
I'm just curious what line of reasoning or criteria that lead to
"dog: awesome, do not abuse! Michael Vick is a monster", "pig: edible",
"spider: kill on sight",
etc.
Is it attractiveness? Perceived benefit to our own species?
I'm a vegetarian, and I also tend to get pests out of my house rather than kill them, where possible (including spiders.) So, I don't get your examples of hypocrisy; they're not acceptable just because everyone is doing them.
I value living things because I'm a chronic Myers Briggs "Feeler" - I put myself in the other things' shoes way too much for my own good, including things like octopuses and pigs. It's much harder for insects because their neural circuitry is so much simpler, but I still try and avoid killing them needlessly.
I, too, consistently test as a "Feeler" when taking Myers-Briggs. Sometimes after it rains I go out side and scoop earthworms back into the grass so they don't dry up and die later. Then I wonder if I should be going to everyone's driveway and doing the same thing.
Then again, I'm not strictly a vegetarian (I eat meat rarely). It's interesting to see how people reason these things - like, for example, at my job there are lots of dog-lovers, but they won't hesitate to kill an ant or spider.
It's much more reasonable to kill a very very simple organism like an ant or spider than a mammal or cephalopod. You're right that the individual choices people make are interesting!
It may have more to do with anthropomorphizing than anything - it's much easier for an urban dweller to project human qualities onto animals like dogs, which they interact with frequently, than the slabs of pig meat they see in stores. A distaste for eating animals perceived to have more human-like qualities follows naturally from avoiding eating humans.
This is a bait-and-switch title. But while we're here and talking of eating octopodes [side note: octopii is way off the mark, mixing classical languages; octopuses is probably in the end the least obnoxious plural], we might bear in mind our obsession for killing rather than wondering at nature with this cautionary tale:
http://io9.com/vacationing-family-finds-exceedingly-rare-hex...
This article has an interesting meta about the conflict between the gourmet and environmental protection approaches to exotic wildlife, that itself is half food article and half human interest story about octopus punching.
This is so Seattle. Kid does something legal, but frowned upon. Angry mob forms on internet, spreads his personal information around and makes threats. Mob reforms after they realize how shitty they are being and creates petition to make sure no one can do this again, ever. Meanwhile, they all go to the fancy restaurant that serves the exact same item they are so against some kid harvesting and rave about it. Seattle.
Seattle is a very religious city, I think he means. I grew up in the South and lived in Seattle for more than a decade and I'd describe Seattle as equally fundamentalist as the South at this point; the only difference being the religion is environmentalism.
It's a thing that happens all the time in Seattle. That is, publicly decry one group for doing something, but have zero problem with another group doing nearly (or exactly) the same thing.
and as a member of nwdiveclub (the local dive forum) I can say that they have zero problem discussing and participating in harvesting of ocean life.
> That is, publicly decry one group for doing something, but have zero problem with another group doing nearly (or exactly) the same thing.
This is a description of everywhere. The only thing Seattle has a monopoly on, is talking shit about Seattle (sorry Portland, we're stealing that one too).
This is true for almost any urban city that has lost the connection between how they think things should be and how things really are. Most urban dwellers have no concept of what it's like to take a living creature and turn it into steak. The distance between the two events is so great that they can hardly imagine it. It's true for things other than meat eating, e.g. wind farms. Everyone wants good clean energy but no one wants a wind farm in their backyard. Everyone (in Seattle) wants to eat octopus salad but no one wants to drag one from the ocean and punch it until it dies.
How a comment which starts with "This is so Seattle" can recieve a single up vote is beyond me.
You also fail to point out the real unique aspect of Seattle culture in your loop.
"Mayer stepped down, and others took the lectern to recite their prepared remarks, which failed to acknowledge that the threat had effectively just been neutralized. Eventually, Mike Racine stood to speak, representing the Washington Scuba Alliance, whose director of conservation, Scott Lundy, first posted Mayer’s photo online. “I did want to recognize that Dylan Mayer is here today. He and his family took a lot of heat over the last week for this legal taking of an octopus. Much of that heat is vitriolic in nature and inappropriate, and Dylan, just so you know, the Scuba Alliance regrets that, and we applaud you for being here,” Racine said. The room stood and clapped. Mayer, once a nemesis of the giant Pacific octopus, had suddenly become its most visible supporter."
I don't know a single city filled with people which, when presented with new information responds so positively. Seattle reacts quickly, information spreads quickly here, but people are also very open minded. More-so than anywhere else I've lived.
That octopus has been at Cove 2 on Alki for years. I got my SCUBA certification there nearly 8 years ago and every greybeard diver raved about this particular octupus. One of the stops on the certification dive was this old, broken sewer line that exposed a cornucopia of marine life, including this huge octopus.
May he/she rest in peace.
Edit: Probably not the same octopus [1] but it made me nostalgic.
I'm always fascinated by the psychology of eating animals, and how society decides which ones are acceptable to eat and which ones aren't. Not that I'm any exception to it, of course, but I at least try to look at it from the outside a bit.
We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous outrage. Why?
It's certainly not the bare fact that he killed an animal for food. That happens all the time, and people mostly don't care.
He ended up doing it in front of a crowd, but that's not the reason either. If he had killed, say, a trout in front of a crowd, nobody would really care.
Nor is it the kind of animal that he killed, not alone. If he had done it in private then told the public about what happened, there would have been no outcry.
Clearly it's some combination of the kind of animal and doing it in public. There's no particular reason either one should matter, though. There is, it appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that makes it a bad choice for food compared to other animals. But clearly it does matter.
I think it comes down to the simple fact that this was an unusual event. And though there was nothing specific about this event that should lead to outcry, the mere fact that it was unusual is enough. A lot of city dwellers are fundamentally uncomfortable with eating meat. Most of them still do it, but they hide behind the various structures that exist between the living animal and their dinner plate to kind of ignore it. I've heard of people seriously saying things like, "It's wrong to kill an animal for meat. You should just buy it from the grocery store." I'm sure most people are not that ignorant, but there's a similar sort of avoiding thinking about the stark reality of slaughtering and butchering.
So you have a bunch of people suddenly confronted with that which they try to ignore. Some of them are outraged by the mechanics of killing and eating an animal. But most of them still eat cows and pigs and chickens which are routinely killed in ways not really different from this. What reason could there be for their outrage, then? It can't be that they're outraged at the overall concept of killing an animal for food. But, ah hah! This is an unusual animal, so it must be that!
And that, I think, is how you end up with a conservation campaign for an animal that is not endangered and not, ultimately, all that special.
I could be way off, but it's interesting to think about.
You're not way off, but, in this case, it has more to do with the fact that the Cove 2 Octopi are particularly beloved among the Seattle diving community.
As a diver in Seattle, this is the real reason. Cove 2 is where many new divers are taken for their initial certifications. That particular octopus has been a local diving attraction for a while, and was used by many groups to teach new divers how to observe underwater creatures without interfering with their habitat.
If you do a search for Alki GPO, from before the harvest, you can find that there were many divers who were able to get their underwater photography hobbies started with a picture of that GPO. This particular GPO was about as tame as any GPO that I've personally seen in the Puget Sound. This gave new divers a chance to take their time trying to get their cameras setup, as well as getting multiple pictures.
Being delicious is a great adaptation though, although it dooms individuals to a premature death, it has secured the future of the species. As long as humans are around, pigs and cows will be as well.
If we weren't so keen on describing things involving humans as "unnatural", I think the relationship between humans and livestock animals would generally be seen as symbiotic (much like ants who farm fungus).
Or maybe it's the belief that humans have abused, and lost, their license to harvest pigs for meat. Take a look at the conditions pigs are raised on in commercial farms. Locking any animal in a cage for its whole life, where it cannot move or tend to itself, is inexcusable. It doesn't matter how intelligent it is, it would be just as impermissible if it were a bee trapped in a cage the size of its own self.
Somewhere about as smart as dogs, if popular trivia is to be believed. Interestingly, there isn't a universal taboo against eating dogs either, taboos against eating dogs are heavily cultural (while taboos against eating humans are far more (although not entirely) universal.)
I haven't thought of that, but it makes sense. Though if we were being "overrun" by a species of hyper-intelligent nonhuman animals, I'm sure we'd get our hunting tools ready. So there's the "rareness" factor.
Then there's the "attractiveness" factor. If I killed a beautiful butterfly (heck, even if I extirpated a bed of tulips) I'd probably be labeled as a sociopath.
Do we know that dogs are not smiling? Anecdotally, my dogs seem to smile when they are happy (when I pet them, give them treats, play with them, etc.) I'm genuinely curious about this.
Some may, perhaps learned from humans, but in general a dog will signal happiness by e.g. wagging the tail, and "smiling" as in baring teeth signals something like aggression or fear.
Which, of course, is why you should never smile at an angry dog.
I see the smiling along with wagging their tail, and I know the difference between what I see as a dog smile (mouth open, ears back, tail wagging, eyes squinting) and baring their teeth.
That is a great example of anthropomorphizing. It assigns a human emotion or behavior to an immutable physical characteristic--the shape of a mouth.
But calling an animal's behavior intelligent or playful is only anthropomorphizing if we know that playing and intelligence are unique to humans. Which we don't.
There is a difference between saying "Oh, that animal acted like a human, it must be just like a human" and "Oh, that animal behaved in a way that I recognize, it probably has some intelligence and capacity for emotion."
There comes a point when something is acting as if it is intelligent, or as if it has emotions, that it's reasonable to assume they are intelligent or they do have emotions. Not necessarily the same as ours, but on a spectrum.
> The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.
My father used to work with "looked after children" (Children in children's homes). He visited a home, and there was a boy there who had a pet crow. The boy had taught this crow some tricks, including holding a cigarette in its beak. (This would have been about 40 years ago.) My pa took a photo of the boy, and his pet crow, and the crow is "smoking". I have that photo still.
I think what I'm trying to say is that individuals have their own reasons for eating (or not eating) various animals, and so long as those people are not too preachy we can all get along. It is odd that societies tend to have differing views on acceptability of eating various animals - dogs are fine in some countries but not others, horse is tasty in France but weird in UK, Cows are sacred to some but delicious to others.
I don't know what point I am making, maybe agreeing somewhat, but after I had finally trapped and killed a field mouse that was causing a lot of havoc in my home I discovered its nest. It had dragged back a number of things for comfort like fluffy small things from the dryer, but notably it had also dragged a golden necklace back there and left it just inside the entrance to its home. I felt a tinge then, like it had appreciated something shiny just because it was pretty and took it to its home. I struggled to think of any other purpose, but still that vermin had caused a lot of damage in my house.
Here are couple of details to add some color:
Cove 2 is one of the most popular dive sites in Puget Sound. It is right in the middle of Seattle, with a stunning view on downtown. It has shower onsite for scuba divers, it has food nearby and parking is reasonably ok for Seattle. It is also benign site which is not current sensitive, meaning you can dive it pretty much anytime (no need to wait for slack or high tide etc.)
This is a default place for a lot of people to take some of their classes. All the locations where octos usually hide are pretty well known to divers here.
Dylan lives somewhere pretty far from that dive site and there are a lot of other places where he could have harvested an octo. Instead of doing so, he chose a most popular dive site around, place well known for people coming to look at octopuses, came there during the day and killed one of the creatures. When somewhat exasperated divers ask him "Dude, WTF?" he told them that he was in his right and suggested to mind their own business.
Imagine a park somewhere, where it is well known that deer come and interact with people. There is a family playing with a nice baby deer here and then a hunter shows up, walks right to the deer, who is not afraid of people and cuts bambi's throat, right in front of the family. Yes, he is within his right to do it, but he behaved like a dick.
That's what started a shitstorm, not a desire to stop harvest of Octos. There is a lot of them in Puget Sound and they are not in any danger and divers know this. Just don't be a jackass and butcher a Bambi in a petting zoo.
> We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous outrage. Why?
I think it's just social taboo.
Everyone defecates, and everyone is fine with that. However if you did that on a public beach, people would be outraged.
Also, if you beat up a cow, dog or bear with your bare hands on a beach, people would be outraged with that too.
I'm not sure that trying to come up with a "rational" way of looking at it makes sense. It makes people uncomfortable because it violates social norms.
You would have to frame the act in certain ways for people to be comfortable with it. If the Octopus was dangerous, for example. Or if you had some elaborate social ritual around killing it. Or if it was structured as your job, people knew you were going to do it humanely. Etc.
I find this interesting. Where I'm from (Spain), octopi are routinely eaten and are considered delicious. I guess it depends on the person, but I'd say piscitarians will eat them.
What he did will be considered the same as someone fishing for, let's say, trout.
This made me think about pandas. I'm not an expert in this at all, so please correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but it seems like the panda bear's evolutionary adaptation is that humans think they are cute. They rarely reproduce, sometimes roll over and kill their own young, and eat bamboo, which I believe they struggle to digest. But, humans love them, so they get lots of protection.
That seems more like luck of the draw than an adaptation. They're not domesticated (like livestock or cats/dogs) and probably have not been relying on humans for very long.
Furthermore, IIRC they are more reluctant to breed in captivity than in the wild, so being cute isn't exactly helping their population numbers like it would other animals.
I noticed my site (http://octopus.org) spiked in traffic today - can't be co-incidental. Octopus are fascinating and the more we learn about them, the more they fascinating they become.
I'm concerned a lot less about people eating octopus than about the only legal way to take them being a slow death by blunt trauma. I'm very much a canrnivore, but for pity's sake, make it quick. If the point was to only allow taking them through bycatch, why not just say that?
Yeah, that's pretty strange. You can't kill an octopus with a swift knife blow, or a speargun? Every hunter I've met prefers a quick kill, for both ethical and culinary reasons (adrenaline-soaked meat).
I'm a vegetarian who is supportive of hunting. If you are going to eat meat, hunting and butchering it yourself is by far the most ethical and environmentally sound method of obtaining flesh as food. I simply can't reason with someone who finds it OK to eat an animal, but sleeps with one on the foot of her bed, and rages when someone else hunts.
That said eating octopus and specifically the GPO is particularly unethical if you subscribe to intelligence being related to sentience. Additionally it appears that octpus legs contain brain cells, the part you eat is in part brain.
You know what.. the kid went into the ocean, and wrestled a friggin' octopus out of it. By hand. As far as hunting goes, that's pretty much the most fair way to do it.
Save your lamenting for the industrial-scale mechanized harvest of creatures. His grilled octopus (or whatever he did with it) was orders of magnitude more ethical than that burger you're about to eat.
I'm a SCUBA instructor (trained and living in Vancouver BC), from Seattle.. and I can definitely attest to the character of pacific northwest divers as being very pro-environment, "protect the wildlife", to the point of craziness. Oh man, I can only imagine the aggressive and passive-aggressive reactions this kid got when he pulled that thing out of the water...
Sure, they're nice creatures. If I had a choice, more often than not I would say let the thing be. But I also own a speargun and hunt on occasion. I like the sport, and it feels good to put your own skills on the table once in a awhile. What irritates me is how irrationally angry people get... it's an act of selfishness, a chance for a relatively passive person to stand up for something. It's not really about the octopus, it's about their beliefs. People have to stand for something... whether that's Obama or an Octopus, it doesn't really matter.
The cool thing about running a company, as I'm sure a lot of people here do, is how quickly you get to see the big picture on the world, and sit in the shoes of everyone else's perspective. Wearing a lot of hats and working on hard things really trains you to only give a shit about things that matter, things you can have an influence on, where the goal is not to change people's opinion subjectively, but to prove, objectively, that you can add value and earn a place on this planet.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadJoking aside, I'm very surprised that the teenager was able to escape a nine foot giant octopus. I'm sure he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of his life.
But seriously; if you're ever up in Seattle, despite the touristy nature, the aquarium is totally worth a peek. Watching the G.P.O (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaxG8AnTdE) in it's tank is marvelous; quite majestic creatures, despite absolutely being one of the things I would least like to encounter in the wild. Countless reports of them ripping off essential diving equipment.
In the video above, if you' watch the whole thing, the aquarium employee says "this one is about half full grown."
Interesting article though, it's always fascinating from a social sciences perspective how the perception of a concept can so quickly shift public policy.
The water line is kept lower these days.
Speaking as a vegetarian(!) I found the content of this article to be quite disturbing. Octopii are very special creatures and it is lamentable that this article is essentially what they taste like, how to butcher them and where to go to eat them.
I occasionally daydream about hacking up an electronic waterproof octopus toy, kind of like an underwater "bop it" that I can customise as they learn new features on it.
It makes me sad to read about any of these animals being hunted. They're too cool, leave them alone.
http://io9.com/5626679/three-arguments-for-the-consciousness...
They are, somehow, born with their intelligence. Everything else learns it, all the species you mentioned learn from their parents or surrogates.
Octopus are also a K selected species, laying 200,000 eggs on average. Furthermore, they are short lived in comparison to any other intelligent species.
We associate intelligence with individuality and hence with rarity: each human intelligence is rare because it was cultivated, not born. Octopus aren't like that.
If not, frown.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Otherwise, fascinating points! My day disappeared to Wikipedia thanks to you :-)
I'm not sure how to answer that question myself... but a lot of comments thus far say something like "they are intelligent so leave them alone."
On the other hand, if an animal is ugly or stupid or abundant, like spiders or cockroaches or deer or (I can't think of an example of a stupid animal) then it's okay to exterminate/hunt/harvest/kill them.
I'm just curious what line of reasoning or criteria that lead to "dog: awesome, do not abuse! Michael Vick is a monster", "pig: edible", "spider: kill on sight", etc.
Is it attractiveness? Perceived benefit to our own species?
I value living things because I'm a chronic Myers Briggs "Feeler" - I put myself in the other things' shoes way too much for my own good, including things like octopuses and pigs. It's much harder for insects because their neural circuitry is so much simpler, but I still try and avoid killing them needlessly.
Then again, I'm not strictly a vegetarian (I eat meat rarely). It's interesting to see how people reason these things - like, for example, at my job there are lots of dog-lovers, but they won't hesitate to kill an ant or spider.
I grew up on a farm, and have killed plenty of animals for food... But I don't see a reason to do so just because they're "annoying".
Hell, I've called the RSPCA to deal with brown snakes instead of killing them, and they will kill you ten times over if they decide to. /Shrugs
If it's not going to be eaten, and you're not about to die from it, then why kill any animal at all?
You had me concerned there for a moment until I figured out that you weren't talking about the "brown snakes" that are in North America.
As a digression -- they're prawns. Not shrimps. Never got that.
Worth the read.
Do you even know that protesters and the diners are the same people?
Or did you mean that Seattle is a city with a politically diverse population?
and as a member of nwdiveclub (the local dive forum) I can say that they have zero problem discussing and participating in harvesting of ocean life.
This is a description of everywhere. The only thing Seattle has a monopoly on, is talking shit about Seattle (sorry Portland, we're stealing that one too).
You also fail to point out the real unique aspect of Seattle culture in your loop.
"Mayer stepped down, and others took the lectern to recite their prepared remarks, which failed to acknowledge that the threat had effectively just been neutralized. Eventually, Mike Racine stood to speak, representing the Washington Scuba Alliance, whose director of conservation, Scott Lundy, first posted Mayer’s photo online. “I did want to recognize that Dylan Mayer is here today. He and his family took a lot of heat over the last week for this legal taking of an octopus. Much of that heat is vitriolic in nature and inappropriate, and Dylan, just so you know, the Scuba Alliance regrets that, and we applaud you for being here,” Racine said. The room stood and clapped. Mayer, once a nemesis of the giant Pacific octopus, had suddenly become its most visible supporter."
I don't know a single city filled with people which, when presented with new information responds so positively. Seattle reacts quickly, information spreads quickly here, but people are also very open minded. More-so than anywhere else I've lived.
May he/she rest in peace.
Edit: Probably not the same octopus [1] but it made me nostalgic.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan_...
We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous outrage. Why?
It's certainly not the bare fact that he killed an animal for food. That happens all the time, and people mostly don't care.
He ended up doing it in front of a crowd, but that's not the reason either. If he had killed, say, a trout in front of a crowd, nobody would really care.
Nor is it the kind of animal that he killed, not alone. If he had done it in private then told the public about what happened, there would have been no outcry.
Clearly it's some combination of the kind of animal and doing it in public. There's no particular reason either one should matter, though. There is, it appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that makes it a bad choice for food compared to other animals. But clearly it does matter.
I think it comes down to the simple fact that this was an unusual event. And though there was nothing specific about this event that should lead to outcry, the mere fact that it was unusual is enough. A lot of city dwellers are fundamentally uncomfortable with eating meat. Most of them still do it, but they hide behind the various structures that exist between the living animal and their dinner plate to kind of ignore it. I've heard of people seriously saying things like, "It's wrong to kill an animal for meat. You should just buy it from the grocery store." I'm sure most people are not that ignorant, but there's a similar sort of avoiding thinking about the stark reality of slaughtering and butchering.
So you have a bunch of people suddenly confronted with that which they try to ignore. Some of them are outraged by the mechanics of killing and eating an animal. But most of them still eat cows and pigs and chickens which are routinely killed in ways not really different from this. What reason could there be for their outrage, then? It can't be that they're outraged at the overall concept of killing an animal for food. But, ah hah! This is an unusual animal, so it must be that!
And that, I think, is how you end up with a conservation campaign for an animal that is not endangered and not, ultimately, all that special.
I could be way off, but it's interesting to think about.
If you do a search for Alki GPO, from before the harvest, you can find that there were many divers who were able to get their underwater photography hobbies started with a picture of that GPO. This particular GPO was about as tame as any GPO that I've personally seen in the Puget Sound. This gave new divers a chance to take their time trying to get their cameras setup, as well as getting multiple pictures.
Octopuses are intelligent. They are playful and awesome. You've seen the video of octopuses using coconut shells to hide in?
If we weren't so keen on describing things involving humans as "unnatural", I think the relationship between humans and livestock animals would generally be seen as symbiotic (much like ants who farm fungus).
But maybe they're inflating the pig's intelligence because they don't want people to eat pigs?
Then there's the "attractiveness" factor. If I killed a beautiful butterfly (heck, even if I extirpated a bed of tulips) I'd probably be labeled as a sociopath.
Which, of course, is why you should never smile at an angry dog.
But calling an animal's behavior intelligent or playful is only anthropomorphizing if we know that playing and intelligence are unique to humans. Which we don't.
This "dolphins play with bubble rings" video is ancient but great. Play is perhaps a tricky word, but still.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q
There comes a point when something is acting as if it is intelligent, or as if it has emotions, that it's reasonable to assume they are intelligent or they do have emotions. Not necessarily the same as ours, but on a spectrum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DoWdHOtlrk
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091214-octop...
> The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8408233.stm
http://www.sefs.washington.edu/research.acl/Crows_and_Other_...
My father used to work with "looked after children" (Children in children's homes). He visited a home, and there was a boy there who had a pet crow. The boy had taught this crow some tricks, including holding a cigarette in its beak. (This would have been about 40 years ago.) My pa took a photo of the boy, and his pet crow, and the crow is "smoking". I have that photo still.
I think what I'm trying to say is that individuals have their own reasons for eating (or not eating) various animals, and so long as those people are not too preachy we can all get along. It is odd that societies tend to have differing views on acceptability of eating various animals - dogs are fine in some countries but not others, horse is tasty in France but weird in UK, Cows are sacred to some but delicious to others.
Dylan lives somewhere pretty far from that dive site and there are a lot of other places where he could have harvested an octo. Instead of doing so, he chose a most popular dive site around, place well known for people coming to look at octopuses, came there during the day and killed one of the creatures. When somewhat exasperated divers ask him "Dude, WTF?" he told them that he was in his right and suggested to mind their own business.
Imagine a park somewhere, where it is well known that deer come and interact with people. There is a family playing with a nice baby deer here and then a hunter shows up, walks right to the deer, who is not afraid of people and cuts bambi's throat, right in front of the family. Yes, he is within his right to do it, but he behaved like a dick.
That's what started a shitstorm, not a desire to stop harvest of Octos. There is a lot of them in Puget Sound and they are not in any danger and divers know this. Just don't be a jackass and butcher a Bambi in a petting zoo.
I think it's just social taboo.
Everyone defecates, and everyone is fine with that. However if you did that on a public beach, people would be outraged.
Also, if you beat up a cow, dog or bear with your bare hands on a beach, people would be outraged with that too.
I'm not sure that trying to come up with a "rational" way of looking at it makes sense. It makes people uncomfortable because it violates social norms.
You would have to frame the act in certain ways for people to be comfortable with it. If the Octopus was dangerous, for example. Or if you had some elaborate social ritual around killing it. Or if it was structured as your job, people knew you were going to do it humanely. Etc.
What he did will be considered the same as someone fishing for, let's say, trout.
I guess it depends a lot on the local culture.
This made me think about pandas. I'm not an expert in this at all, so please correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but it seems like the panda bear's evolutionary adaptation is that humans think they are cute. They rarely reproduce, sometimes roll over and kill their own young, and eat bamboo, which I believe they struggle to digest. But, humans love them, so they get lots of protection.
Furthermore, IIRC they are more reluctant to breed in captivity than in the wild, so being cute isn't exactly helping their population numbers like it would other animals.
That said eating octopus and specifically the GPO is particularly unethical if you subscribe to intelligence being related to sentience. Additionally it appears that octpus legs contain brain cells, the part you eat is in part brain.
So how can you reconcile those two things?
I'd say that we meat-eaters are the ones who have to reconcile them.
Save your lamenting for the industrial-scale mechanized harvest of creatures. His grilled octopus (or whatever he did with it) was orders of magnitude more ethical than that burger you're about to eat.
No more of an ethical issue than using an IDE vs typing in the raw binary with your "0" and "1" keys.
Sure, they're nice creatures. If I had a choice, more often than not I would say let the thing be. But I also own a speargun and hunt on occasion. I like the sport, and it feels good to put your own skills on the table once in a awhile. What irritates me is how irrationally angry people get... it's an act of selfishness, a chance for a relatively passive person to stand up for something. It's not really about the octopus, it's about their beliefs. People have to stand for something... whether that's Obama or an Octopus, it doesn't really matter.
The cool thing about running a company, as I'm sure a lot of people here do, is how quickly you get to see the big picture on the world, and sit in the shoes of everyone else's perspective. Wearing a lot of hats and working on hard things really trains you to only give a shit about things that matter, things you can have an influence on, where the goal is not to change people's opinion subjectively, but to prove, objectively, that you can add value and earn a place on this planet.