Octopus farm’s ‘cruel’ plan to freeze ‘sentient’ animals to death prompts calls for ban

Activists are campaigning to shut down the world's first commercial octopus farm in the Canary Islands over its "cruel" plan to kill hundreds of thousands of animals a year by freezing them to death. The proposals, by Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova, would involve keeping the eight-legged cephalopods, in crowded tanks and under constant light, despite the fact that they are solitary by nature and prefer the dark.

Nueva Pescanova has submitted its application to the General Directorate of Fishing and the Government of the Canary Islands.

Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), which is investigating the situation along with Eurogroup for Animals, today published a new report, Uncovering the Horrific Reality of Octopus Farming, in which it sets out concerns about the massive project, calling for the application to be rejected on the grounds of cruelty.

The two organisations have also urged the European Union to withhold public funds from all such future projects, highlighting "hazardous" environmental concerns including a "cruel" slaughter method which utilises ice slurry and confines octopuses in small, cramped tanks.

The report claims roughly one million octopuses will be reared at the planned farm in the Port of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, Spain, producing 3,000 tonnes of octopus annually.

"Octopus are solitary by nature & territorial, if we keep them in high densities in farms this will be very stressful, it can lead to aggression, cannibalization"@elarabcn, our Research Manager, on @BBCWorld calling for plans to start farming #octopus to be rejected. pic.twitter.com/5sMy5Ul1Pq

Octopus is an increasingly popular food, especially in Spain, with wild octopus numbers plummeting as a result.

Eight years ago, the number of octopuses caught around the world reached a record high of 400,000 tonnes – 10 times more than in 1950.

A separate report published by CiWF in 2021, Octopus Factory Farming: A Recipe for Disaster, suggested the mortality rate at such facilities would be roughly 20 percent, meaning one in five octopuses would not survive the entire production cycle.

If it gets the green light, the Canary Islands farm would be the first industrial octopus farm in the world, although there are also projects being mooted for Mexico and Japan.

Elena Lara, CiWF's Fish Research Manager and author of the report, said: "We implore the Canary Islands authorities to reject Nueva Pescanova's plans and we urge the EU to ban octopus farming as part of its current legislative review.

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"It will inflict unnecessary suffering on these intelligent, sentient and fascinating creatures, which need to explore and engage with the environment as part of their natural behaviour. Their carnivorous diets require huge quantities of animal protein to sustain, contributing to overfishing at a time when fish stocks are already under immense pressure.

"We should be ending factory farming, not finding new species to confine in underwater factory farms."

Reineke Hameleers, CEO of Eurogroup for Animals, added: "Blindly establishing a new farming system without consideration of the ethical and environmental implications is a step in all the wrong directions and flies in the face of the EU's plans for a sustainable food transformation.

"With the current revision of the animal welfare legislation, the European Commission now has the real opportunity to avoid the terrible suffering of millions of animals. We cannot afford to leave aquatic animals behind."

Octopuses have widely believed to be the brightest of all invertebrates, skilled at solving a variety of problems, and by some estimations are as intelligent as cats.

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In recent years they have been the subject of two high-profile documentaries.

In the BBC's The Octopus in My House, released in 2019, marine biologist David School installs a tank in his living room in order to study an octopus at close quarters.

In Netflix's My Octopus Teacher, released in 2020, filmmaker Craig Forster forges a close friendship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest.

Both include striking examples of their famous problem-solving ability.

Express.co.uk has approached Nueva Pescanova for comment.