The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery is the journey of a woman's obsession with a cephalopod. Or, should I say, a series of cephalopods at the New England Aquarium.  Basically, it turns out that octopuses don't live that long and Montgomery keeps going back with her special behind the scene privileges (she gets a badge that says "Octopus Observer") to touch and interact with octopuses and that also involves watching them die.

If you are interested in what it's like when someone becomes obsessive over something, a something that you are not particularly invested in, this might be for you.  If you yourself are obsessed with sea life, mollusks, or octopuses in particular, this might be for you. If you are a person who wants a very surface level understanding of the life cycle of an octopus, this might be for you.

This is not the book for you if you care about octopuses, though. Montgomery claims this is an "exploration into the consciousness" of an octopus. If you think this is so, then how is it fair to kidnap an octopus out of the ocean to put on display?  Is that fair to a sentient creature? And then, you end up with too many octopuses to store safely, so one is kept in a 50-gallon barrel for most of its life?  And then, when that octopus gets to be moved, it's not kept in a safe enough space (octopuses are notoriously hard to "cage" because they're super smart and can get out of even the tiniest of spaces) and is killed when it escapes?

I am not in any way against zoos and aquariums. I recognize the value inherent in the research and conservation many of them do.  If this book had given any indication that the octopuses were there for any reason other than as display animals, I might have given the NEA more of a break.

But.

"But the acquarium didn't have time for a younger octopus to grown up - they needed a display octopus immediately. "An aquarium without an octopus," as the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee of Brighton, UK, wrote in 1875, "is like a plum pudding without plums." So Bill had ordered from his supplier a new octopus big enough to impress the public." (page 33)

This is what made me IRATE.

Rant over.