First post on the forum so be gentle.
TL;DR: The Spanish company Nueva Pescanova is planning to farm octopus and begin selling it on the market in 2023. They intend to sell 3,000 tons of farmed octopus per year, which amounts to several hundred thousand octopuses. This is concerning given that octopuses are highly intelligent animals; there are no released standards for how the octopuses are going to be kept and raised, nor for how they will be slaughtered. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of coordinated action against this yet.
Link to the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59667645
It seems right to rank octopuses and other cephalopods very highly, maybe near the top, in terms of how much suffering they could experience due to human farming.
Note that we now probably have some ideas for getting higher resolution information about suffering. This gives important information about the suffering inflicted on farm animals. So suffering might not be directly connected to intelligence.
In the case of octopuses:
In the same way that the above environments might be nightmarish for octopuses, many factory farm practices probably inflict unnatural and tortuous conditions on animals, often for tiny economic benefit.
Sometimes, people seem to directly draw a line between intelligence and capacity to suffer. But I don’t think a simple mapping is ideal when considering how to reduce suffering.
To get intuition, it seems that many abilities or traits that we consider to be intelligence don't have anything to do with strength of feeling or suffering. For example, if I can do more math or write better, I doubt that this means my personal suffering from negative stimuli must be higher.
I've worked with people who are smart, they seem to have eidetic memory, extraordinary... (read more)