[Animals] "Slow and cruel death": the details leaked to the BBC about the project to create the world's first octopus farm in Spain

[HeWhoRemains™]

A plan to build the world's first octopus farm has raised deep concerns among scientists about the well-being of these intelligent creatures.

 

The farm's project in the Canary Islands, Spain, is to raise around a million octopuses a year to be eaten as food, according to confidential documents to which the BBC had access.

These mollusks have never been intensively farmed and some scientists classify as "cruel" the method proposed to kill them with ice water.

The Spanish multinational behind the plans denies that the octopuses suffer.

The confidential documents of the proposal of the company Nueva Pescanova were delivered to the BBC by the organization "Eurogroup for Animals", which seeks to improve the treatment of animals in the European Union.

slow and stressful death

Wild-caught octopus with pots, lines, and traps are eaten all over the world, including in the Mediterranean, Asia, and Latin America.

 

The race to discover the secret to breeding them in captivity has been going on for decades. It's difficult since the larvae only eat live food and need a carefully controlled environment, but Nueva Pescanova announced in 2019 that it had made a scientific breakthrough.

 

The prospect of intensively farming octopuses has already drawn opposition: Washington state lawmakers have proposed banning the practice before it even begins.

 

Nueva Pescanova's plans reveal that the octopuses, which are solitary animals accustomed to the dark, would be kept in tanks with other octopuses, sometimes under constant light. The creatures - the octopus vulgaris species - would be housed in some 1,000 community tanks in a two-story building in the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

To kill them, they would place them in containers of water at -3 °C, as specified in the documents.

There are currently no animal welfare rules protecting them, as octopuses have never been commercially farmed before.

However, studies have shown that this culling method using "ice sludge" causes a slow and stressful death in fish.

The World Organization for Animal Health says it "results in poor fish welfare" and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), the main certification scheme for farmed seafood, proposes a ban unless the fish are stunned. beforehand.

For this reason, some supermarkets in Europe have stopped selling fish that was slaughtered with ice.

Professor Peter Tse, a neurologist at Dartmouth University in the US, told the BBC that "killing them with ice would be a slow death...it would be very cruel and should not be allowed."

Adding that they were "as smart as cats", he suggested that a more humane way would be to kill them as many fishermen do: by hitting them over the head.