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Comment by justrealist | Hacker News Reader

Tuna (horrific overfishing) and octopus (intelligence) are the two animals I won't eat.

Amusing anecdote - I used to eat octopus whenever I could get my hands on it, but always as an ingredient in a larger dish - e.g. chunks of octopus in a stew or sauce.

One day I ordered octopus tentacle from a tapas bar, and it arrived whole (and beautifully presented as a centerpiece of sorts). This surfaced many memories of nature documentaries demonstrating the wit and resilience of the octopus.

Looking at the delicacy artfully arranged on its plate, all I could think was "Jesus, that's _someone's arm_ we're eating!"

Took a bite, nearly threw up, and haven't eaten octopus since.

Pigs are smart too. Octopuses at least don’t live very long in the wild either.

Sorry to hear that you developed an irrational phobia. But lets try to see the positive side of this history: more octopus for me.

Sounds like you briefly became aware of a cognitive dissonance and even stumbled upon an subconscious ideology, in this case Carnism.

Melanie Joy speaks wonderfully on this subject and your realization: https://www.richroll.com/podcast/melanie-joy/

Another important candidate are shark fins. Not only are sharks of many kinds endangered, cutting of their fins and tossing the still living shark back in the ocean is especially cruel and wasteful.

But considering that most fish species are endangered and basically all of them are contaminated by plastic, there is good reason to avoid seafood altogether. Unless perhaps if you know that it has been fished sustainably from a local stable population. Which still wouldn't change the issues with the plastic.

Ok sure I just mean of foods I might normally eat in normal life. I've never even had the option of declining shark fin soup.

Unfortunately, they are still popular in parts of Asia. You don't see them at every corner, but e.g. in Taipeh it was offered in some places. And it is consumed enough to drive several species of sharks into extinction. Which of course, beyond the cruelty, will disrupt the eco systems further.

The speciesism in this comment is profound, as if you have some empirical evidence an octupus is more intelligent than, say, a pig; or whether a creature's lack of ability to reason (versus feel pain and suffer) gives way to treat it cruelly.

Yeah, I think you would have to avoid many mammals, if you have these concerns; it's debatable how much this should even mater.

Alligators may seem "dumb", but they're smarter than us, if you go only by success. We don't know what all those nice sunbathes do for the animal.

Could bring the same joy and nastagia as climbing to the top of the mountain. Who are we to spoil this? How is it different from the joy we experience, or that of an octopus, pig, dog, ect as it frolics in the fields?

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