this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Every animal can react to their environment, including avoiding predators. Not all of them do it perfectly, but it is a basic survival skill for mobile life forms.
In the wild an octopus often hides in a tight space to protect itself and wanders out to feed, then returns to their safe location afterwards. They avoid predators while doing so. Lots of animals will be less active when predators are out and about, or will be active during times where it is more difficult for the predators to hunt.
Yes, an octopus is a very clever animal but really we should stop killing them because we are absolutely crushing their populations.
It could also hide from predators in an aquarium where it will be brought food every day and get medicine from a veterinarian if it gets sick. An Aquarium is the safest place for the octopus to live, so why wouldn't it's survival instinct tell it to live there to hide from predators?
We should set up an experiment with an aquarium that allows the octopus access to the ocean. Do you really think the Octopus would run away from the aquarium where it's safe from predators and gets fed every day?
The stories I here about Octopi make them sound more like an intelligent creature we don't understand rather than "lots of creatures escape their cages to go hunting and then return before anyone notices. This is natural behavior for an animal."
Yes, the mind of an octopus is unknowable, and it could be just acting on instinct. It could also have some measure of sentience, and there is no way to really know. As such maybe we should err on the side of caution and not keep them in little pens for us to gawk at.
I do agree we need to respect them a lot more and make a much stronger public message that they're not food and certainly shouldn't be tortured and treated as inhumanely as we routinely do.
As someone who studied a lot of neurology, I could make a very strong argument that much of our behavior, no matter how well-reasoned we think it is, no matter how complex it is, is actually also just a very sophisticated system for facilitating our instinctual needs. The brain has a very real tendency to post-hoc justify our decisions and actions so much that we never notice it, but if you start to explore it, you will realize really quick that a lot of what we do and think we're choosing to do, are just products of very basic wants.
This isn't to diminish either them nor us, only to say that whatever is going inside that incredibly ancient brain of theirs, it's still a lot like us and needs to be respected as such.