What do you think about octopus? I happen to like them a lot. I’ve mentioned this before. I mean I like them. I used to be very partial to octopus as a foodstuff. Then I saw one in the wild, and I said ‘Never again. No more polypi for me.’ They are bloody brilliant. Move slowly, they like being handled, and are fascinated by your ear canals. They’re affectionate to the point of soppy. Very playful. They try to catch the bubbles off your scuba gear. They’re fun, and weirdly beautiful. Beware if you’re a crayfish. When they’re on the hunt (and they are very skilled hunters), their skin displays very fast and complex changes in vivid colouration to attract and confuse prey. They look like the mothership off Close Encounters.

What has some bunch of Spanish hooligans decided to do? Farm them for food. Nay, nay, and thrice nay. Farm them in a facility in Las Palmas in big tanks. I don’t have a real issue with fish farming, apart from some misgivings about the ecological impact. Fish are shoal animals, used to the idea of hanging round with other fish in the hood. Octopus are very solitary. Under laboratory conditions you can keep maybe five in a BIG tank. If you’re trying to turn out 20,000,000 a year, things are going to be a lot more crowded, and this means very unhappy octopus.

Feed them? How do you do that? Well the perfidious Spanish intend to use fishmeal. Ground up bits of the junk of other fish even petfood manufacturers won’t touch. Listen, people, the octopus is NOT a filter feeder. It’s a predator, a hunter. It’s not going to be happy with a load of castoff entrails!

How do you kill 20,000,000 octopus a year? Even working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year, that’s 55,000 per day. The Spanish have come up with a scheme of cold killing. Immerse the poor buggers in iced water at -3 Celsius. FFS use the old fashioned way and smack them on the head with a big stick*. Certain supermarkets in the UK already ban cold killed fish for sale.

This is all wrong, wrong, wrong.

*I’m not sure how that works, since the octopus doesn’t really have much of a central nervous system, but it has worked for thousands of years.