Six Animals I Couldn’t Eat

Cephalopods

I ate octopus once. It was a whole, pickled one (very small). I swear to you that thing wasn’t dead and spent the rest of the day swimming around in my guts. Eugh.

This was before I did any reading into cephalopod intellect. I swear these things came from another planet; they have brains in their arms!

Everyone knows about the octopuses (octopi is, actually, incorrect as octopus is a Greek, not Latin word… so there) that can open jars after some time spent seeming to think about it, or the tales of sly beasties sneaking out of their tanks at night to feast on other aquarium inhabitants… then sneaking back in again.

They are very curious creatures, hardly ever fleeing from divers (causing Aristotle to think that they are quite, quite stupid), learn relatively quickly… well, they have to; the longest lived species, the giant Pacific octopus, only lasts four years. They may even experience REM; when humans dream.

For a full look at the strange intellect of these other-worldly creatures head over here.

Yeah, I’m not consuming something whose arms think.

Elephants

Elephants are mysterious creatures. Any story about the behaviour of the pachyderm will either give a person the shivers or bring a tear to the eye. There are tales of mother’s mourning their children, lost to illness or poachers, or of whole herds taking vengeance on African tribes by killing not the humans, but their cattle, there are stories of orphans, taken in by humans, who after witnessing their mother’s brutal deaths, have nightmares and cry out in their sleep.

Despite the anger they have been known to show (usually at the loss of a family member), elephants are also tender and even altruistic animals. One lovely example involves an elephant unwilling to drop a log on a sleeping dog. In another example, an elephant charged a herdsman who had ‘invaded’ her land. When she discovered she had seriously injured him, she lifted him under the shade of a tree and guarded him all day, until she was chased off by a search party.

We all know the term “elephant graveyard”, but how many people actually know what this is? It’s not just where they go to die. It is, very much, like our own graveyards. If an elephant dies unexpectedly a family will bury it in a shallow grave or cover it with leaves and dirt. They will rumble and even cry, then all fall terribly silent. They will stay by this makeshift grave, sometimes for days. If an elephant carcass has been moved, the herd will find it and return parts of it to the place the elephant died.

The only other species known to have burial rituals are us and Neanderthals. Combine this with their self awareness (recognising themselves in mirrors), tool use (clogging up water holes so that the water does not evaporate), and their understanding of human speech (an elephant called Koko could be asked to help move around different females in the zoo he lived at with the verbal commands “Connie transfer, Koko give me a hand”) and it’s all a bit too much to swallow.

A Note On Noms

All the species I have mentioned are eaten by people in one part of the world or another. I have no problem with the Turkana tribe killing and eating elephants. I’m not going to complain when Bobby down the road munches on some octopus or squid rings (except… ew… brains). I eat pig. I’d probably eat human if it weren’t a) illegal and b) a great way to give yourself some lovely neurological diseases.

I’m just saying; these are magnificent, beautiful, strange creatures and should be treated with respect… even, perhaps especially, as a food stuff.

You might be wondering where the great apes are in this list. Just… go watch Gorillas in the Mist.