Last year, California and Washington state banned farming octopuses for their meat, and bills have been introduced in seven other states — plus the US Senate — to do the same. Lawmakers in Chile and Spain are weighing a prohibition on farming them, too.

All this legislative activity, and yet there’s not a single octopus farm anywhere in the world.

Inside this story

• A Spanish seafood company, Nueva Pescanova, is looking to build the world’s first octopus farm in the Canary Islands.
  
• The farm would raise around 1 million octopuses annually in small tanks, where the animals would be kept for months until killed slowly and painfully in ice slurry.
  
• A coalition of animal welfare activists, ocean conservationists, and academics has formed to oppose the idea, arguing that farming the wild, intelligent, cannibalistic, and solitary creatures is impractical and inhumane.

This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.

The movement to ban octopus farming before it starts — led by animal welfare activists, ocean conservationists, and concerned academics — might be easy to dismiss as a solution in search of a problem. On paper, farming them doesn’t even make sense: they’re wild, solitary, carnivorous, and cannibalistic; in the first two months of their lives they’re incredibly fragile and the vast majority die; and their urine contains high amounts of ammonia, which means whatever company that farms them would have to deal with the ordeal of a lot of polluted water.

They’re also talented escape artists.

These are all traits you really don’t want in an animal you’re trying to farm. But it hasn’t stopped the Spanish seafood giant Nueva Pescanova from trying to make large-scale octopus farming a thing in order to supply “premium international markets,” like the US, South Korea, and Japan, where consumer demand for octopus meat is on the rise.

Currently, huge numbers of octopuses are already caught from the wild to be used for food. In 2023, over 350,000 metric tons of octopuses were captured from the ocean, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which totals well over 100 million individual animals. They’re typically caught in traps — which they mistake for natural shelter — and then killed using a variety of disturbing methods, including clubbing them in the head, stabbing their brains, or hanging them in the air to suffocate to death.

But octopus catches have declined in some regions due to overfishing — and so, to create a more reliable supply, Nueva Pescanova hopes to open its first octopus farm as soon as it passes an environmental review. But to those who oppose octopus farming, the pursuit is impractical at best, and morally atrocious at worst, given the animals’ complex needs and impressive cognitive abilities. Octopuses can use tools, solve problems, and they even like to engage in play. In the wild, their home ranges span several acres where they hunt, hide, and explore.

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“This is a solitary animal that requires a lot of stimulus…So putting it into a confined setting that has high density with other [animals] creates immeasurable stress, produces aggression, produces high levels of cannibalism,” Sophika Kostyniuk, an ecologist and managing director of the nonprofit Aquatic Life Institute, told me. “It is just totally unethical.”

The (im)practicalities of octopus farming

In 2019, Nueva Pescanova

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