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Octopuses and squids deserve the same legal protection as other laboratory
animals, according to a leading animal welfare organisation. The Universities
Federation for Animal Welfare has written to the Home Office asking it to
extend the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act of 1986, which controls animal
experiments in Britain, to include cephalopods. The act now covers only
vertebrate animals.

‘It is time to consider the cephalopods,’ says Roger Ewbank, UFAW’s
director. Unique among invertebrates, cephalopods rival fish in the complexity
of their nervous systems and their behaviour. ‘We can only assume that they
are capable of experiencing a great deal of suffering,’ he says.

UFAW has published a report which concludes that the animals are ‘poorly
served’ compared with vertebrate experimental animals. Most are taken from
the wild only to die from injuries in a matter of days. They are ‘treated
as wild animals, only temporarily resident in the laboratory’, says Peter
Boyle of the University of Aberdeen, and author of the report. They survive
long enough for some experiments, so ‘little attention is given to the refinements
of condition and management’, he says.

Cephalopods have soft, delicate skins that are easily damaged during
capture by commercial fishing gear. Few caught in this way survive long
in captivity. Squids are best caught by hand, attracted by strong lights
at night to jigged lures. Octopuses fare best if trapped in lines of earthenware
pots placed on the seabed, in which they readily shelter.

But even if cephalopods survive capture, they suffer if kept in the
wrong conditions. Octopuses often become tame in captivity, but squid taken
from the sea ‘remain very nervous animals which must not be exposed to sudden
stimuli such as lights, movements and vibration’. Moreover, ‘because squids
are adapted to live in open water, they readily dash into the sides of aquarium
tanks’, says Boyle, causing fatal damage to skin, nerves and muscles.

Research is ‘urgently needed’ into the physiological effects of stress
in captive cephalopods, says Boyle. ‘The present tendency is to use wild-caught
animals as soon as possible after capture more or less ignoring the possibility
of such stress,’ says Boyle.

Anaesthesia in cephalopods is also ‘at a relatively primitive stage’,
he says. Researchers generally anaesthetise animals by immersing them in
solutions of urethane or ethanol until they stop breathing. At this point
they begin to asphyxiate, so operations must be completed within 10 to 20
minutes. ‘As yet, there have been no attempts to establish methods of continuous
and controllable anaesthesia,’ says Boyle.