Gonna go out on a limb (hah) and guess that his winning strategy 9/10 times was "squeeze through thing you didn't think he could squeeze through."

That's part of it but he had an ability to break locks and dismantle constructs with ease. I realized after a while he paid immense attention to how we installed every new addition to his habitat and then would seemingly aim to deconstruct our creations using the knowledge he picked up from our installation work. I truly am in awe of these creatures, especially after one of the long time Shedd workers told me that this particular octopus was just one of a group of very smart cephalopods they've had and that one of his relatives was even more intelligent!

This is fabulous.

It's clear from just watching video clips of them that it's not just about being able to squeeze through gaps. They evidently experience puzzles with an enthusiasm that is unusual even in puzzle-solving birds, can seemingly understand quite complex things like how to non-destructively unscrew bottle tops, and from what I can gather they are kind of obsessed with jars and containers?

As an untrained nerd I have often wondered if they have, due to the maximally prehensile nature of their bodies, a genuinely superhuman, volumetric cognition of 3D shape -- a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.

The lack of trial and error when you see some of these puzzles being solved suggests they might have a much better grasp of 3D shape interaction than adult humans.

They love playing with containers and jars, absolutely. The male I have been describing especially enjoyed opening tightly sealed jars - although he displayed an aversion to all jars for a bit of time after one of the few times we put him with the octopus I'd call the "alpha female". He had handed her a large jar to play with, in what I would describe as an act of kindness. She proceeded to open it and take it back to him. He squeezed inside the jar - and then with intense rapidity, she immediately began screwing the lid back on, trapping him inside. We had to let the poor guy out after she waltzed away and seemingly had zero interest in letting him out. We never let the two of them play together unsupervised after that, worried for his safety.

Oof! A jarring misunderstanding about personal space.

>a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.

Watching an Octopus effortlessly change colour, size and texture to camouflage themselves might lend to this.

> Watching an Octopus effortlessly change colour, size and texture to camouflage themselves might lend to this.

Yes -- I was thinking about this bit myself.

I don't know whether it has been demonstrated that they have any kind of conscious control over this texture control, or whether it happens as a sort of evolved feedback loop, but I did wonder.

That's fascinating. Would love to hear about what kinds of contraptions you made that were breakable, given I'm struggling to imagine how you couldn't conceive of a way to keep said octopus trapped. How difficult can it be?

As noted above - you leave the tiniest hole and they'll escape. Or we might be trying to confine him to a portion of the habitat for a certain purpose and he would break his way out of his "sub-domain".

> I did not eat octopus prior to this but I became firmly in support of encouraging everyone to avoid eating octopus and related creatures after this experience. Not only do I think they're immensely intelligent animals, I am firmly convinced that this particular specimen was smarter than a number of humans that I have met.

Where I live octopus is a very popular food, representative of our gastronomy. I love everything about eating it. But, as you said, the notion that these are highly intelligent animals has been creeping into me. I've also experienced over this last decade how much more intelligent birds are than previously thought, so I can connect the dots. Also, pigs.

Still, I might die with this moral debacle active, for much I want to respect life in general, I don't think I can give up the party surrounding octopus gastronomy. Time will tell.

I am mainly a vegetarian, although I will eat ethically raised eggs and dairy products. I grew up in farm country and will also, on a very rare occasion, eat cattle raised on a proper farm/ranch - even though I absolutely love cows, who can be extremely affectionate, I believe they can be slaughtered relatively humanely.

Cephalopods, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to farm in the wild or cull. They show immense and immediate signs of stress, such as attacking others or themselves, going as far to tear off limbs or kill others/commit suicide. I've never seen a cow, when properly taken through the slaughter process (such as using processes innovated by Temple Grandin), express anywhere near that level of despondent agony prior to their death, which is thankfully nearly instantaneous when done properly. The intense response by octopi to their impending slaughter shows me a level of emotion and intelligence that is eerily close to our own.

> going as far to tear off limbs or kill others/commit suicide.

Not to distract to much from your wider point, but I was under the impression that most species of octopi are solitary and it was not uncommon for them to kill and even eat each other on encounters even when not captured for slaughter. Is that not the case?

This is absolutely true - but the immediacy and severity of these attacks when being "farmed" in the wild is brutal and very much unlike the occasional attacks in the wild, which aren't necessarily nearly as fatal nor as likely to result in loss of limb(s).

> I grew up in farm country and will also, on a very rare occasion, eat cattle raised on a proper farm/ranch - even though I absolutely love cows, who can be extremely affectionate, I believe they can be slaughtered relatively humanely.

I agree that eg Cattle can have a good life living on pastoral land eating grass and so on. Can be slaughtered humanely close to home. That meat born, raised and slaughtered all within 20-30 miles of the consumer can be relatively low impact.

I'd quite like to only eat meat matching that description. I'd also like to minimise my food miles overall. But honestly it's not trivial to even approach the problem when eating out. Even the supermarket makes for a long slow shopping process looking for anything fresh that hasn't been flown in.

I am simply too lazy to be good about this, so outside of weekends when I have time to go to a butcher or a farm shop... well I'm part of the problem

> The intense response by octopi to their impending slaughter shows me a level of emotion and intelligence that is eerily close to our own.

It’s almost an expression of existential dread and the realization the end is nigh.

To paraphrase Planck, ethics advances one funeral at a time. There are many historical activities which were condoned at the time but now seem abhorrent to us. Participants (or perpetrators, depending on how judgemental you are feeling) in those unethical activities probably never fully recanted, and the best thing they did was to somehow manage not to pass the desire on to the next generation.

I'm trying to cut meats out of my diet slowly. All seafood was easy as I was never that into it. Pig meat on the other hand... Bacon, Ham, Pork, etc. I knew that it had to go. So I started with that.

Currently I'm an opportunitarian. Chicken is the meat of choice if I can't handle the vegetarian option, otherwise beef. But pig and all seafood is gone from my diet. My hope is that plant-based or cultured meat improves to the point where I don't have these ethical dilemmas anymore. Until then I'll do my best.

I know it's not perfect but it's something. I think more people need to understand that eating and culture are hard to seperate and we need to accomodate that. Making meat a sometimes food is the first step.

Good for you. Keep at it! I became a vegetarian a year ago, at the age of 42, when my eating habits were firmly established. I loved meat and seafood of all kinds, and was the sort of carnivore who was proud of eating the weirdest and bloodiest animal parts available. But at some point I started actually thinking about the animals and the ethics of killing for food, and I couldn’t conscience it any more. Now that you are thinking about it too, I expect your journey will end with you also ceasing to eat meat. Your other option is to tamp down those feelings and ignore what you are feeling is wrong. For good people, that is not easy.

I know you didn’t ask for advice, so apologies in advance, but a really helpful thing is to simply ensure you have plentiful vegetarian food available, so you don’t get too hungry. Eg nuts, seeds, fruit (including dried), plus stuff you can easily use to whip up tasty dishes, like rice you’ve already cooked and can fry with mushrooms or something. At this point the only things I miss are cured meats like ham and salami. But I eat very well every day and in general feel very happy with my choice.

Much respect to you and good luck!

I at least appreciate your attempts! I'm completely plant-based, but I'm firmly with you that making meat a "sometimes" food is a great idea.

I think a lot of people nowadays seem to be completely one side or the other on a range of topics and it doesn't need to be so clear cut.

In our case we have to avoid gluten, which means avoiding wheats. Most vegetarian dishes contain wheat in some form. So far I haven’t been able to create a week menu with sufficient nutrients without meat or gluten.

It would mean taking supplements. Not sure whether I can stomach the hit to enjoying food it would entail.

Maize, rice, potatoes, sweat potatoes, bananas are among the alternative sources that can provide as much starch as wheat, but without any gluten.

I do not have gluten intolerance, but I like better the sources of starch mentioned above, so there are decades since I have last eaten wheat or any of its relatives that contain gluten.

However, I eat only food that I prepare myself from raw ingredients, so I can control precisely its composition. Therefore I can easily avoid what I do not want, e.g. wheat, sugar or undesirable fat sources.

While avoiding gluten is easy, completely avoiding meat is much more difficult, because unlike some kinds of meat, e.g. turkey meat, which are almost pure protein, so you can easily make a menu with a small quantity of meat that is enough to cover your daily needs, covering the same needs with vegetable protein is difficult.

The same small quantity of protein requires either a much larger quantity of vegetables with high protein content and mixed from at least 2 different kinds with complementary amino-acid profile, which will provide much more calories than meat, so to compensate you will have to eat less of other vegetables that you might like more, or you might want to replace meat with vegetable protein extracts, but those are much more expensive than meat and I would not trust their producers to use the best extraction procedures instead of using the cheapest extraction methods.

For now, I do not have enough time and money to eat completely vegan food, so I make 2 exceptions.

My daily menus include 160 g of turkey meat and a spoon of fish oil.

Because these 2 items cover the required daily intake for everything that is hard to get from completely vegan food, I am free to choose the rest of the food from a large variety of strictly non-animal sources.

Tried to reduce the meat in my diet, to be honest even beforehand I was probably under the average. But I had hard time staying in pure veg diet. But I never managed to stay on only vegetarian diet. I am not monitoring myself but have few days of no meat a week, depending on my mood and whats in fridge.

I also only eat free range meat now, its much more ethical (in my mind at least). You still eat animals, but at least they had a safe environment to live in. I am not feeling guilty and I think its ok to just reduce amounts and experiment with veg dishes.

I'm vegan, I love it when people to take this approach. I went through the same process: I eliminated red meat first, then chicken, then fish, hung out for a while as vegetarian, then dropped honey/dairy, and then (hardest step) cheese before finally making the jump to full veganism. Currently trying to reduce cocoa, though I haven't completely eliminated it yet.

Part of what I like about people taking the more gradual approach is that I think they're much less likely to hit a wall and then go back to eating everything. Instead, every step of the process starts from a position of security/safety, and it ends up looking more like a person saying, "I'm comfortable not eating X, maybe I could also be comfortable not eating Y." And I think that makes things a lot less intimidating, and I think it makes it easier to build a different palete, and I think it means that each step is something that's small and surmountable rather than forcing you to build a substitute for every single food at once.

One thing I did as even a micro-step for some categories like dairy was to allow myself to order certain food at a restaurant but not buy it at a grocery store. You could also do the opposite -- depending on where you live, going vegetarian/vegan at restaurants is a good way of figuring out what alternative foods exist and what options you have for meat/dairy replacements.

And honestly, I also think this approach lines up somewhat well with veganism's overall philosophy, which is not about being in a position of moral superiority or about being perfect, it's about reducing harm. Going vegan doesn't mean none of your consumption contributes to suffering, it just reduces that number a bit. And the gradual process (on top of being (imo) easier to do and being less likely to result in backsliding to older habits) also kind of forces the person to live for a while in an uncomfortable place where they're trying to do better and aren't necessarily happy with their efforts or where they currently are. Again opinion me, but I think that's a good emotion for people to get used to if they become vegan; it guards against some of the tendency towards self-importance or pride that gets associated with veganism sometimes. I think it's good to be in a mindset of "X causes suffering, and independent of any other factor do I personally need to do X?"

Of course I'm hoping people go further than just reducing meat consumption, and I do hope that people don't take one step and say, "that's good enough, I don't need to ever think about this again." I also encourage taking tangible steps where you completely cut a food out rather than just reduce it, because "reducing" is a really fuzzy word that is easy to backslide on, and eliminating a food from a diet is a lot more tangible. But even if someone doesn't go any further or take those more tangible steps, reducing is still better than nothing. And I just think -- start with reducing, and see what happens. If you find out you can reduce, then maybe you can stretch a bit further and full-on eliminate that specific animal product, and then maybe you can stretch a bit further again and repeat the process with something else.

You get used to just looking around creatively at your life to see if there are small improvements to your consumption habits you can make, and then afterwards looking around again to see if there are new improvements you can make. I make vegan meals and enjoy certain vegetables now that I would not have had either the knowledge to pull off or the palete to enjoy when I started reducing meat. I think back to when I was getting rid of beef/pork, and there are literally foods that I didn't like back then that are now solid meat substitutes for me.

So you're saying you're ok eating dumber animals and leave the intelligent ones alive. Interesting…

Yeah, I don't totally get equating greater intelligence with greater capacity to suffer.

Greater intelligence allows greater introspection, prediction, rumination; allows one to build a model of self and environment not possible at lower intelligence. The suffering that is possible when you can anticipate your death, or imagine a hopeless future, turns otherwise neutral situations into hells.

This is a double edged sword: an animal that is incapable of imagining a hopeless future may also be incapable of understanding that certain terrors it faces are temporary, and thus may live in anguish much more as it has a poorer mental model of its own situation.

This is true, for example I've handled both captive and wild animals naive to humans from the same species (for conservation related research). The captive ones are a bit feisty, but the wild ones are so terrified they are basically in shock and won't move.

Personally, if I have to eat an animal, I'd much rather focus first and foremost on eating the creature that has been killed in as painless, immediate and stressless a way as possible. If choosing between meat options that all have been relatively humanely slaughtered, then I might start to look at other factors such as intelligence or environmental impact of a particular species being raised for food.

That seems like a reasonable heuristic and I understand why someone might feel drawn to put a greater inherent value on intelligent species on an emotional level, but I just don't see the relevance of intelligence in and of itself in terms of ethics.

The problem is harming sentient, conscious creatures. No consciousness, no problem. More consciousness, more problem. Intelligence is not the same as consciousness, but they are highly correlated.

How do you measure that? I mean, both intelligence, emotions, etc. I think your morals are so subjective that will not matter. You should eat animals based on more objective points, like nutritional factor, availability, rather than emotional arguments.

How to measure.. capacity to suffer or intelligence? Both are a active fields of research, the former in the neurobiology, animal welfare, ethology space.

I should add though, I think the science on the nature of sentience and suffering is not quite at a point to support some of the recent proclaimations made on the subject. There's enough there though that I reckon the precautionary principle is defensible though.

Also, to be fair to the people arguing for reducing suffering, doing so can be defended in a entirely rational ethical framework, it need not be an emotional argument. I'm just not sure within that framework how defensible it is to assume intelligence and potential capacity to suffer are correlated for many of the 'higher' animals we eat.

I guess it's a question of when does your moral kicks in and makes you feel bad about the kill.

I've seen and participated both in killing of pig and chicken. Multiple pigs are always a problem that needs to be addressed as they go crazy when they hear the first one die. When you kill a chicken and bleed it out to the ground the other chickens come to pick the blood and totally incapable of realizing the same fate will come to them.

Even lower are insects like a wasp. If you cut its head it will try to eat it then when that fails it grabs it's own head and fly it to home because its second algorithm is called "gather food". I'm not even sure you can call this "intelligence".

I have serious problems killing pigs and I would never attempt one because it feels wrong. But chickens are dumb man, I don't have any problems killing and eating them whatsoever.

I totally get where you are coming from, but I want to discuss one thing you mentioned.

You decided to stop eating octopus, because they're very smart animals. Which is understandable to me. But why do you decide what animals to eat, based on how intelligent they seem to us? If we turn that argument around, it's okay to eat an animal if its 'dumb'. Why is that so?

To show my perspective, I am becoming more vegetarian the more time passes, because I just can't justify anymore how we treat animals which are meant for comsumption - Forcefully impregnating them, taking their kids away, keeping them in cages yada yada yada. Which means that for me it does not matter how subjectively or objectively intelligent an animal is, same as how I don't treat humans based on their intelligence. Mostly. Of course, if I have to explain something to another human, my explanation will vary on how intelligent they seem to me. But I think you know what I mean :)

As far as I know, pigs are extremely intelligent. Maybe not on the level of an octopus, but still. So, do you eat pig?

And to end, I am not trying to accuse you of any wrongdoing or whatever, its just very interesting to me and I want to talk about it.

Maybe it’s based on the assumption that more complex organisms are more sensitive and thus the suffering that is experienced is bigger.

Could be, yes. Although I do wonder if the average octopus suffers more when being killed than the average cow. If so, then I wonder if that relates to intelligence or to other factors. Structure of nerves etc.

If an octopus wasn't able to feel anything, it would again be okay to eat it? Or if it was sedated before killing it, would that change anything?

Lots of open questions I guess, but I'm just brainstorming a bit :)

Apologies this wasn't more clear and I am sorry I didn't get back to you sooner; I have never been a consumer of octopus or cephalopods more broadly. I rarely eat meat in general - maybe once a year - and when I do, I only eat meat that has been raised on a small farm humanely and is likewise slaughtered humanely.

The closest I get to regular meat eating is consumption of eggs and dairy. I get both from small, local farms. The chickens are free range and the farmers avoid industrial egg farming mechanisms that result in unnecessary death of grown animals. The cattle are not pumped with grotesque amounts of hormones nor are they milked on factory-like rotating milk pumps that maximize output and ignore the unneeded stress placed on the animals.

Hope this makes sense, as I agree with all the concerns you raised.

I eat all animals, octopus is delicious. What I do practice is compassion and respect for when I do, going out of my way to ensure it was done so in as an ethical and sustainable way as possible. Much of my protein these days I catch myself.

An unnecessary killing is never respectful. You can attach whatever rituals and formalities to the process to ease your conscience, but at the end of the day if you kill a sentient animal for momentary pleasure, you don’t respect it in the slightest.

Seems like kind of an oxymoron to have a living being killed and subsequently eaten, then claim compassion and respect.

So you hate your food?

No, not at all. I don't claim to love and have compassion without backing it up.

> compassion and respect

I hope the long-dead animal on your plate will be able to appreciate your compassion and respect ;)

> ethical and sustainable way

How would you describe ethical and sustainable meat production, or in other words, what qualifies as ethical and sustainable for you?

If there will force to push for veganism, it won’t be PETAs approach of showing grotesque treatment of animals in factory farms. It will be death-by-a-thousand cuts from individual anecdotes of animals demonstrating human-like qualities.