Yet my qualms about eating octopus cannot stem from biological kinship. It waited until it knew the keeper was watching before contemptuously dumping the food down the drain. One captive octopus wanted to demonstrate its resentment at being fed second-rate food. In many ways octopuses are like toddlers. It can turn off lights by squirting water at them, negotiate mazes, undo jam jars from the inside, carry round two halves of a coconut shell and assemble a house from them wherever it stops, and recognise individual human keepers, even when the keepers are wearing identical uniforms. It smells and tastes with its arms, sees with its skin, plays with toys and craves novelty. Its oesophagus tunnels through its brain, and the brain is sometimes skewered by a spiky mouthful of food. It can squeeze through a hole the size of its eyeball. I know now that an octopus is fearfully and wonderfully made, just as the Psalmist tells me I am, and so to eat it seems like a kind of cannibalism. Peter Godfrey-Smith has spoiled it for me. I used to enjoy eating barbecued octopus.
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