e-4312 (Animals)

Petition to the Government of Canada

• Companies around the world have begun developing industrial-scale commercial cephalopod farms, in which tens of thousands of octopus or squid would be bred, raised and slaughtered for human consumption;
• Octopus are highly intelligent, inquisitive and complex beings who, despite their different physiology, feel and respond to pain in a similar way to mammals;
• Octopus are solitary, wild animals, who are particularly ill-suited to being raised in captivity and would suffer greatly on industrial farms;
• There is currently no legislation protecting the welfare of farmed cephalopods in those jurisdictions where octopus farming is being developed;
• Octopus farming raises significant environmental concerns due to new effluents being produced and subsequently discharged into surrounding ecosystems;
• Octopus farm escapes also pose a serious risk to local habitats and wild animal populations with a high potential of transmitting on-farm diseases;
• A substantial increase in the use of fishmeal and fish oil products to feed carnivorous farmed octopus will only contribute to the unsustainable pressure exerted on wild fish populations;
• Octopus farming also poses serious public health risks, as captive cephalopods could be vectors of multiple unknown pathogens and zoonotic diseases such as cholera; and
• Large-scale aquatic farms are a breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria and therefore contribute to the overuse of antibiotics and the dangerous creation of multidrug-resistant bacteria.