Rosa has been
vegetarian for a couple of years now. She used to be pescatarian, which I was
quite happy with as I enjoy a lot of fish and seafood, but having a vegetarian daughter
is fairly irritating when you’re a carnivorous parent.
That said I do respect
her decision - and her resolve as I mischievously sizzle bacon in the pan for
breakfast. I know that is the one thing she craves. Evil dad she sometimes
calls me…
I, on the hand, have
no such culinary morals. I readily eat veal for example and have no qualms
about eating foie gras (though I rarely do as I don’t particularly like it).
But there is one thing
I refuse to eat - octopus.
I did used to enjoy a
bit of pulpo in a tapas restaurant occasionally. Then I read a book called
“Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey-Smith which opened my eyes to the remarkable
intelligence of the eight-tentacled cephalopod and its cousin the cuttlefish.
The most fascinating
thing is that octopuses (or should that be octopi?) have developed an
intelligence that is completely independent and quite different to ours.
We have to go back 600
million years to find a common ancestor between us and the octopus, probably
some sort of worm, only a few millimetres long and perhaps with primitive eyes.
It also had simple neurons. These two evolutionary branches diverged greatly, leading
to molluscs (including octopuses) and arthropods (insects etc.) on one branch;
and vertebrates, mammals, primates and ultimately humans on the other branch.
It seems the primitive
nerve cells developed in very different ways down the two branches. On the one
hand we have mammalian brains - a central processing unit connected to most of
the body via the spinal column.
The octopus, however,
has a sort of distributed intelligence - eight semi-autonomous brains controlling
each arm, connected to a central brain. Chop an arm off and it will continue to
function independently for a time, feeling its way over rocks and so on. So,
the octopus effectively has nine brains.
An octopus in a jar
will quickly learn to unscrew the lid from the inside and escape. Octopuses in a
laboratory tank are well known for playing pranks on the scientists, for
example squirting water at them as they walk past. But they also exhibit
intelligence in ways we barely understand. Many octopuses and their relatives cuttlefish,
put on spectacular colour shows, rapidly changing the pigments in their skin,
sometimes for camouflage but also as a way of communicating. But we have yet to
decode their language. You can find clips of this on YouTube, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXhwmpsdKwg.
In addition, octopuses
have three hearts, have blue copper-based blood, can smell through their
suckers and squirt poisonous ink, to name just a few features.
Somehow it just feels
wrong to eat such a remarkable creature. Or to perform experiments on it.
When it comes to Parkinson’s
research, experiments are not performed on octopuses, but they are commonly
performed on rats and occasionally on monkeys. Rats are the laboratory animal of
choice because they can be chemically induced with a form of Parkinson’s in
order to perform initial trials on new drugs. Incidentally, I suspect this is
not a very reliable model because nearly all of the drugs that show promise in
rats fail in humans.
Is this morally justifiable?
If deliberately crippling and then cutting open the brains of animals can help lead
to treatments to end the misery for 10 million people worldwide, is that a sacrifice
worth making?
Many people can come to terms with performing experiments on rats, which seem to be far simpler creatures than us, but struggle when it comes to other primates, which demonstrate more human like behaviours. However, what the octopus teaches us is that animals we take for granted may be sentient in ways we have yet to understand.
There are no easy answers here. No black and white, no right or wrong. Only shades of grey and difficult choices.
Many people can come to terms with performing experiments on rats, which seem to be far simpler creatures than us, but struggle when it comes to other primates, which demonstrate more human like behaviours. However, what the octopus teaches us is that animals we take for granted may be sentient in ways we have yet to understand.
There are no easy answers here. No black and white, no right or wrong. Only shades of grey and difficult choices.
Returning to the
octopus, there is something else surprising. The dense mass of neurons in each arm,
and the associated cephalopod ink, carry rich concentrations of levodopa, the
main drug used to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Luckily levodopa can
be artificially manufactured. But suppose that wasn’t the case and the best
source was octopus. Then, for me at least, that really would be a dilemma.
