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Already passed in Washington State and California, this bill seeks to ban octopus farming altogether before it ever becomes reality and before a powerful lobby emerges to defend it.
Octopuses, with three hearts and remarkable intelligence, remain among the most intriguing non-human species ever studied. Despite their unsuitability for domestication, multiple plans are emerging to farm them intensively.
The most worrying proposal comes from the company Nueva Pescanova, which aims to establish Europe’s first octopus farm in the Canary Islands, as well as breed and kill over 1 million octopuses per year.
In the United States, hope takes the form of the OCTOPUS Act. Already passed in Washington State and California, this bill seeks to ban octopus farming altogether before it ever becomes reality. Animal rights organizations are not stopping there, as they plan to introduce this preventive bill in at least five additional states.
What exactly are preventive policies? Why are they becoming a preferred strategy for animal rights organizations?
Preventive policies function as a preemptive strike, making it possible to ban or regulate activities that have the potential to cause harm. Such policies are particularly valuable in the context of animal welfare because they can stop inhumane practices before they become ingrained, or before powerful lobbying groups form around them. As the old English proverb goes: “Better safe than sorry.”
Why do animal rights organizations favor preventive policies?
One of the most powerful, albeit challenging, ways of countering animal suffering at scale is through policy change. Over the past three decades, preventive policies have gained momentum as a key tool for environmental protection. More recently, animal rights organizations have also turned to this strategy as a way of protecting animals.
The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.
Preventive policies are also more politically feasible. At present, octopus meat is caught wild, and local fishermen have not been targeted by the policy. They are even in favor of the OCTOPUS Act because it will protect their activities. There is less resistance to such a ban because no industry currently exists for farming octopuses. Contrast this with efforts to end factory farming for chickens or pigs, where deeply entrenched lobbies make change difficult.
Overall, preventive policies lay the groundwork for long-term, sustainable change. They can create a ripple effect, setting a precedent that can inspire other countries to follow suit. Eurogroup for Animals has already suggested that the European Union should consider similar legislation: “If the U.S. can do it, the E.U. can too.”
Do preventive policies live up to the expectations?
While preventive policies are powerful, they are not without drawbacks. Policies take a long time to draft, introduce, pass through the appropriate legislative bodies, and, at last, implement. In the interim, harmful practices may even develop in other jurisdictions. Preventive policies do not offer the immediate relief that animal advocates are hoping for.
Another concern is that restricting a practice through legal means could give rise to covert practices that are even more harmful or make it more difficult to ensure animal welfare standards. The demand for octopus meat could lead to illegal activities, such as black market trade or trafficking.
It is also challenging to quantify the precise impact of any one policy on animal suffering. Animal protection is multifactorial. Policies are just one piece of the puzzle that includes advocacy efforts, campaigns, public awareness, and social pressure as well as shifts in cultural attitudes. While the OCTOPUS Act may prevent octopus farming in the United States, how much animal suffering will be reduced? We cannot assume that harm will be entirely eradicated without continued effort across multiple fronts.
How can we ensure that preventive policies make a difference?
We must endorse a holistic approach to ensure that policies like the OCTOPUS Act carry the weight we intend. Science and research should inform the drafting of legislation, ensuring that laws are grounded in deep understanding of animal cognition and welfare. Simultaneously, advocacy campaigns and public pressure help generate the social momentum to push these policies forward.
Creative expressions—whether through art, film, or photography—can also play a significant role in raising awareness, in fostering empathy for animals, and in driving change. My Octopus Teacher is a brilliant example of this. While the impact of these efforts is even harder to quantify, they are often the spark that leads to legislative change.
Preventive policies alone are not a silver bullet, but they are an essential tool in the fight for animal welfare. The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.
May this bill pass in many other states, create change internationally, and set a precedent to safeguard the lives of billions of animals.
If you are on your toes, you note what we are witnessing is not about Trump at all. It is about us. What forces us, the raw mass of humanity born into the worst of all times, to give this vile, florid, and stupid monster a seat at the head of the table?
Pundits, a day later, ruminate about who won the September 10th "presidential debate," but that is the wrong question. The most important revelation from Tuesday night's clusterfuck of bad theater ought to be this: the patient won't survive. The bedridden train-wreck sprawled across the gurney in the hospice unit is the United States of America—and the debate wasn't destined to be revelatory. We already knew that the corpse, writhing and contorting in agony, will need life-support first and a skilled embalmer soon enough. The debate proved for the billionth time that the greatest country on earth has less hope than a popsicle on the surface of the sun.
The debate wasn't about Kamala Harris—she is the default mode, the automatic pilot, a celebration of generic items, a slinky on a long stair case, a golf course watering system in a terminal draught, a row of telephone poles on an endless train ride. Forget about her. She does not exist. AI created her.
This debate was about Donald Trump. If an alien spacecraft lands on your street and parks next to a Honda Fit, the make of the car becomes irrelevant. If you are waking in the morning with a blister on your little toe and notice a tumor growing out of your side as big as the bathroom sink, you no longer attend to the foot discomfort.
Trump is our measuring stick, our gauge of disease, our face of national distress. If Trump had a debate with Jesus himself you wouldn't see it as the bantering back and forth between good and evil—you'd look at Trump and ask, "What the fuck is that?" In any context, Trump does not belong. He is a walking double take. You look at Trump as if your arm falls off and blood streams from your empty shoulder. He is bad shit that should not be there—but there he is.
If Trump had a debate with Jesus himself you wouldn't see it as the bantering back and forth between good and evil—you'd look at Trump and ask, "What the fuck is that?"
For Trump is not the typical American occupant of our national throne—a guy who merely dispenses weapons to right-wing dictators in the name of freedom and the memory of the founding fathers. No, Trump's vileness resembles, but supersedes a bad mushroom trip. A close up screenshot of Trump's face makes you long for a hang gliding mishap and a seat in the waiting room adjacent to the furnaces of hell.
But, if you are on your toes, you note that it is not Trump at all. It is about us. What forces us, the raw mass of humanity born into the worst of all times, to give this vile, florid, and stupid monster a seat at the head of the table?
What terrible rot eats us alive and, in the process causes us to see Trump as an answer to life's most difficult question? In the final, and darkest hour in all human history, what must we do to redeem ourselves? Trump!
And what did Trump tell us in this thigh-smacking comedy called the "Sixth Extinction Slapstick Special"?
For starters Trump told us that all the murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and gangsters dispersed across the entirety of creation have been systematically funneled to the U.S. southern border. All the jails and mental institutions from the stellar nurseries of the Orion Nebula to the Barbary coast have been drained of their residents. The universe, thus, suddenly has no crime, save for "migrant crime" in the land of stars and stripes.
We have all the crime from everywhere and everywhere has no crime at all.
Can you imagine that maybe a couple billion years hence, a team of alien explorers lands on the burnt remnants of our planet and discovers the video of Tuesday's debate?
Trump also told us that these alien thugs have been eating our dogs and cats. For a man who almost chose canine executioner, Kristi Noem, to be his vice president, and who fathered two of the world's most cruel trophy hunters, this sudden passion for animal welfare caught many of us off guard.
He argued back and forth with Kamala Harris about which one fracked the hardest. Picture two arsonists bickering over which one owns the largest gas can, and you get the idea.
He informed us that Harris is a radical Marxist, coming for your guns, Hummers, and bacon.
He let us know that the "Democrat Party" executes babies after birth and that every legal scholar from D.C. to the Big Bang had been clamoring to send abortion back to the states. 100% of our legal minds from Clarence Thomas to Perry Mason had, according to Trump, opposed Rowe v Wade since the universe began as expanding hot plasma. Not a single legal scholar had even one kind word for Rowe, and everyone knows it.
He also said stuff like this:
We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic. We handed them over a country where the economy and where the stock market was higher than it was before the pandemic came in. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. We made ventilators for the entire world. We got gowns. We got masks. We did things that nobody thought possible. And people give me credit for rebuilding the military. They give me credit for a lot of things. But not enough credit for the great job we did with the pandemic. But the only jobs they got were bounce-back jobs. These were jobs, bounce back. And it bounced back and it went to their benefit. But I was the one that created them. They know it and so does everybody else.
And, if you crave more, here you go:
And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase: Make America Great Again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
Can you imagine that maybe a couple billion years hence, a team of alien explorers lands on the burnt remnants of our planet and discovers the video of Tuesday's debate? What will our alien visitors say to one another? Perhaps they'll say, "Those dumb fucks where watching this and chewing on popcorn while their planet roasted."
Perhaps the cruelest aliens will talk shit about our long imploded civilization: “Thank the god, Aghjestymunbo, that these crazy motherfuckers killed themselves before they learned how easy intergalactic technology is!”
I am not certain that billions of years from now our aliens will know what popcorn is. I also have no idea if intergalactic wanderers will have the requisite sense of humor to appreciate Donald Trump. If they do, all will not be lost.
Scientists warn that debris from the Maui fires pose a signficant threat to vulnerable coral reefs.
The wildfires that engulfed the town of Lahaina, Maui, last week killed at least 111 people. But it's not only human lives that could be lost.
Scientists say that forecast rains could wash the ash and toxic debris from the fires into the ocean, where they could have a devastating impact on marine ecosystems that are already stressed by pollution and the climate crisis.
"You have a reef that is already damaged by many other things and then you have a sedimentation event on top of that," California Academy of Sciences ichthyology curator Luiz Rocha toldThe Guardian Friday. "A lot more coral are going to die."
"Keeping those reefs safe is one of our higher priorities."
The fire debris pose several threats to the reefs. For one, the corals may accidentally gobble up pollutants in the fire debris, mistaking them for plankton.
"We don't know what was in those houses, and a lot of times when things burn and when they mix together, they can form other things that can be dangerous," U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Strike Team Lieutenant Trent Brown toldThe Garden Island Wednesday of the contents of potential runoff.
If those toxins end up in the water, it could be devastating for the reefs.
"The corals are attached to the bottom of the ocean, they cannot move," Jennifer Smith, director of the Marine Biology Research Division at University of California, San Diego, told NBC Bay Area Tuesday. "So if you were to rain a bunch of sediment, ash, debris on top of them, they could essentially become smothered. Add to that a lot of this ash and debris could have chemical toxins."
Beyond smothering the reefs, the sediment could also provide food for algal blooms that would block the sunlight.
"It is going to heavily damage the coral reefs," Rocha told The Guardian further. "They depend on clear water to survive."
One dangerous pollutant has already entered the water because of the fires: oil. The oil has spilled from boats in the Lahaina Marina that sank during the disaster, and the U.S. Coast Guard is working to contain it, as well as prevent any runoff from reaching the reefs, by setting up booms around storm drains and the marina itself.
"Keeping those reefs safe is one of our higher priorities," Brown told The Garden Island. "I know that's a very valuable natural resource here in the Hawaiian Islands, and that's what all that boom is there for—to try to minimize any impacts for those reefs, either from physical debris or sorts of toxic chemicals."
West Maui's reefs are vital economically for attracting tourism, culturally for their importance to Indigenous Hawaiians, and ecologically for their role in the islands' broader ocean community, The Guardian explained. They spawn coral that help build reefs in the rest of Maui, Lanai, Molokai, and Kahoolawe, and one threatened reef—the Olowalu—hosts the largest population of manta rays in the U.S.
"These reefs have high concentrations of endemic marine species that don't live anywhere else in the world," Rob Ferguson, an expert in coral reef watershed management who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's coral reef conservation program, told The Guardian.
Above the waves, the fires also took a devastating toll on domesticated animals.
Maui Humane Society head Lisa Labrecque told reporters Monday that residents lost around 3,000 pets during the blaze, as Vox reported.
"Our veterinary, humane enforcement, and search and rescue teams are reporting back every day that there are many stray animals. Cats, dogs, rabbits, tortoises, birds, livestock etc.," the group wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.
In a statement Wednesday, the national Humane Society said that while it was hard to gauge the exact number of animal casualties, "it's likely the toll is significant."
"Thankfully," the group added, "local organizations such as the Maui Humane Society and Hawaii Veterinary Medical Association are working with others to find animal survivors and give them a fighting chance."