Hi, I’m Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa with Meat Your Future. Inky the octopus made
headlines recently for his bold escape from the National Aquarium in New Zealand.
He waited until it was dark and staff had gone home. Then, in the middle of the night,
he managed to get out of his glass tank enclosure, quietly slithered across the floor, squeezed
himself through a small drain hole, and finally down a 50 meter long pipe to freedom in the
Pacific Ocean – leaving nothing but a trail of slime for the aquarium staff to recreate
his amazing escape.
The aquarium manager, Rob Yarrall, said Inky “managed to make his way to one of the drain
holes that go back to the ocean, and off he went…” He “[d]idn’t even leave us a message."
Mr. Yarrall added that Inky was very friendly, and would frequently grab you with his tentacles
or squirt water playfully when being fed, and that he figured out how to unscrew a jar.
The communication manager for the city council commented on the escape, noting that many
nonhumans are indeed very smart, and that Inky thought out his escape, so good for him.
However, for biologists who are more familiar with these animals, the intelligence and dexterity
displayed in the escape is really not surprising. They’re smart, and they’re resourceful.
You can see them here, for example, carrying coconut shells to build underwater shelters.
But we treat these clearly sentient and intelligent animals as mere objects, to buy and sell for
consumption. Many people don’t give it a second’s thought, even as these animals
make every effort to stay away from our mouths – as we can see here.
People describe eating these animals as rubbery in texture and flavorless. Really, on all
levels, I find it hard to understand why anyone would want to eat these creatures.
Let's see what one octopus-eater has to say:
Octopus Eater: “So we have these live octopuses here, and we’re going to eat them. Ugh…ahh.
It doesn't want to leave…it’s like.
Let go. Frick’n.
Ugh.
Ugh...come back, come back, come back.
Okay, stop.
That’s it.
Ahh...done.
Other Person: “How was it? Describe your experience.”
Octopus Eater: “The moment I put it in my mouth, I just had to commit to it. But otherwise, just touching
it and everything, it’s slimly, it’s starting to stick everywhere, it’s legs are going all over the place."
Dr. Jennifer Mather, a cephalopod expert and
professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, has studied octopuses
and their close relatives since 1978 and has extensive field research. She commented
on the practice of cooking and eating octopuses alive.
She says, “There is absolutely no doubt that they feel pain. They have a nervous system
which is much more distributed than ours…. [T]he octopus, which you’ve been chopping
to pieces, is feeling pain every time you do it. It’s just as painful as if it were
a hog, a fish, or a rabbit, if you chopped a rabbit’s leg off piece by piece. So it’s
a barbaric thing to do to the animal.”
Eating an animal alive is not only revolting for many people, in my medical opinion, it
could also be unsafe if the animal squirms and moves while in the process of being swallowed.
But it’s also important to remember that other species that are similarly used for
food, even though they are usually not eaten alive – like chickens, pigs, cows and fish
– do not “donate” their flesh either.
When we turn any living, breathing, complex individual into “edibles”, it necessarily
involves inflicting harm on that individual, and almost always accompanied by terror, fear
and needless suffering as well. From the perspective of the animals, we take his or her one and
only life away, and turn their existence into a real-life horror movie, one
in which they fight with futility until the very end as they try to stay alive.
Here are just a few seconds of footage that we recently filmed ourselves at a slaughterhouse.
We kill approximately 65 billion land animals, and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals every
year for food. This scene is literally happening again and again to other animals right now,
and it’s happening literally every single minute of every single hour of every single
day, all year long, year-after-year. What an unnecessary horror show for foods we do
not even need.
And, moreover, there is now broad consensus that the production of animal foods is also
an environmental disaster of immense and global proportions. Just to briefly touch on this,
according to the United Nations FAO, raising animals for food is responsible for more human-caused
greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global transportation sector combined. And, “the
livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it
is the major driver of deforestation, as well as one of the leading drivers of land degradation,
pollution, climate change, overfishing” among other serious global environmental issues.
As for our marine ecosystems, upon which octopuses and other aquatic animals depend, loss of
ocean biodiversity has been accelerating at an unprecedented and alarming rate. We now
have the technology to extract nearly every fish in the ocean; in fact, we have enough
fishing capacity to cover at least four Earth-like planets. We are literally eating the oceans dry.
An extensive four-year study from Dalhousie University found, if our current fishing trends
continue, we will face a global marine ecosystem collapse and essentially have fish-free oceans by 2048.
And from a health and nutritional perspective, plant-based protein is far better for us than
animal protein. For one, it does not come with any cholesterol, which cannot be said
for even so-called “lean” meats like chicken and turkey.
Animal protein, in general, also results in our increased production of the hormone IGF-1,
which is consistently associated with increased cancer risk.
There are many other problematic aspects related to animal foods as well, which is probably
why Dr. Walter Willett, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, recommends that you
“[p]ick the best protein packages by emphasizing plant sources of protein [over] animal sources”.
And why the president of the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Kim Williams, both recommends
a vegan diet and is a long-time vegan himself.
And why Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest HMOs in the country, is looking for ways “to
make plant-based diets the new normal for [its] patients and employees.”
The fact that we do not biologically need to eat any animal foods is not controversial.
So, why continue to eat these foods if it’s unnecessary and causes so many global environmental
problems, not to mention so much suffering for so many sentient animals?
If you’re not doing so already, I invite you to leave animal foods off of your plates
forever and go vegan – for your health, for the environment, and for the animals.
Thank you very much.