Shropshire Star

Stop chopping up intelligent octopuses

I read that octopuses long to communicate with humans.

Published

So, what do we do? We wrench them from the safety of their deep sea home, stick them on a plate in a noisy, alien environment and proceed to cut their limbs off, one by one and eat them.

How perverse and disgusting are we? We deserve no sympathy for any catastrophe that might befall us as we stand silently by, watching what our craven species members do.

We should be shouting our protests out to our useless MPs to get this practice banned, but they, being more interested in their own concerns and apathetic to any other, obdurately close their minds to any issue they consider unimportant and trivial.

Except this one isn’t. It is crucial to our life on Earth that we love and protect all creatures “great and small” and we ignore cruelty to others at our peril.

The argument at the heart of veganism is just this – why should others suffer because we “like a nice steak”?

Because we put our degraded appetites before any other consideration.

Our planet could and should be a Garden of Eden, and yet all we have done is defile it and treat it with utter contempt.

Mother Earth has clearly had enough of our nonsense and is now in a process of putting us in our place, as evidenced by all the environmental catastrophes now taking place, with more predicted to follow.

Will Knott, Shrewsbury

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