Save the cephalopod

Rights for wrigglers are disgracefully absent from the government's animal welfare reforms

The government's proposed animal welfare reforms have one inexcusable omission, The Times reports today. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, ducks, geese and even sharks can all look forward to a better life, a victory for vertebrates. Sadly the same is not true for octopuses and cuttlefish.

As if to highlight the oversight, Radio 4's book of the week is Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith. This celebration of the octopus is several years old now, so it is intriguing that the Beeb should have chosen this week to read it. The timing is pure coincidence, even if in my more fanciful moments I like to imagine the octopuses arranging it, but it does surely reflect the growing power of the cephalopod lobby.

We reported in March that cuttlefish had passed the so-called marshmallow test. And the Netflix film My Octopus Teacher, revealing the profound bond that developed in just months between a diver and his eight-armed friend, recently won the Oscar and the Bafta for best documentary. These weird beasts of the sea, the closest we'll get to alien intelligence, as Godfrey-Smith says, are flavour of the month, if you'll forgive the expression (sorry, octo-pals).

I urge you to listen to Lord Percy's sonorous reading of the book or, better yet, to read it yourself. In case you don't have time, I'll share some cephalo-factoids.

The most recent common ancestor of humans and octopuses was a small, flattened worm 600 million years ago. This was before the invention of blood, so cephalopods decided to make theirs with copper, not iron, which is why it is bluey-green. This also means their minds — and they are certainly sentient — are an entirely separate evolution from those of mammals and birds.

Some octopuses like to turn out their aquarium lights by short-circuiting them with a jet of water. Why? Because it's a laugh. A researcher conditioned three octopuses to pull a lever to get food, but one of them decided it was more fun to smash the lever to bits. Octopuses particularly like crab, and one octopus that was fed shrimp, making sure its pet researcher was watching, disdainfully chucked the substandard meal into the water outlet pipe, the closest thing it had to a rubbish chute.

In one place off the east coast of Australia Godfrey-Smith says octopuses have been building an artificial reef out of scallops shells. He has watched generations of them (they live two years at most) building and expanding their octopolis, as he calls it. It's a cephalopod city.

A Guardian report a few years ago revealed that cephalopods were surviving the warming of the oceans, even thriving. Perhaps, when mankind has wiped itself out by rendering its habitat uninhabitable, we may hope the glorious tentacular day will dawn: the age of the octopus. So long, suckers.