{"id":58916,"date":"2015-06-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58916"},"modified":"2015-05-31T16:37:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T15:37:06","slug":"consider-the-octopus-a-little-boys-moving-case-against-eating-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/consider-the-octopus-a-little-boys-moving-case-against-eating-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Consider the Octopus: A Little Boy\u2019s Moving Case against Eating Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disarming wisdom from a tiny-bodied, huge-hearted human animal.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"octopus2<\/a><\/p>\n

Several months ago, a stirring New Yorker<\/em> article<\/a> by Sylvia Killingsworth stopped me dead in my bipedal tracks and made me \u2014 a longtime pescaterian aglow with the self-satisfied illusion of siding with \u201csustainable\u201d seafood \u2014 suddenly consider the octopus. What does it really means to sustain creaturely empathy for a being so different from us? More than one of our planet\u2019s most breathtaking creatures<\/a>, it is a life form a biologist quoted in Killingsworth\u2019s piece believes is \u201cprobably the closest we\u2019ll get to meeting an intelligent alien\u201d \u2014 and yet, as Killingsworth makes clear, one we murder with such devastating inhumanity that I couldn\u2019t help but cringe at the very thought of having once considered it a favorite food. A food<\/em> \u2014 this exquisite masterwork of evolution, this intelligent alien with an order of consciousness so beyond ours that we can barely begin to grasp its extent with the clumsy and insensitive tentacles of our moral imagination.<\/p>\n

But no journalist or biologist or ethicist can hold a candle to a little boy named Luiz and his earnest consideration of the octopus. With incredible clarity and simplicity, this tiny-bodied, huge-hearted human animal makes his case \u2014 the very best case there is \u2014 against eating other animals:<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sJNntUXyWvw<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

For a grownup take on expanding our circle of empathy, see Laurel Braitman\u2019s excellent <\/em>Animal Madness<\/a> and Jon Mooallem\u2019s <\/em>Wild Ones<\/a>, a very different kind of masterwork at the intersection of parenting and interspecies empathy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A \u2018food\u2019 \u2014 this exquisite masterwork of evolution, this intelligent alien with an order of consciousness so beyond ours that we can barely begin to grasp its extent with the clumsy and insensitive tentacles of our moral imagination. Disarming wisdom from a tiny-bodied, huge-hearted human animal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animal-rights-vegetarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}