the squid or the kale?

one of the perks of being underemployed and overschooled is the freedom to watch daytime television. it's a perk i don't often take advantage of since i tend to prefer the serendipitous meanderings of cyberspace to the stuff that seems to show up on my digital tv box. but yesterday i tuned in while i was eating lunch and was rewarded by a discovery channel show on the humboldt squid.

now i'd never heard of the humboldt squid before, but apparently they're known as vicious predators - a sort of lower order (not to mention smaller sized) kraken. even so, they're pretty big puppies - some can grow to a length of 6 feet, and weigh a hundred pounds or more. they travel in schools of a thousand animals plus, and feed crazily, since they only have a year to live, and they clearly have a lot of growth to accomplish in that time. the thing is, they've been associated with attacks on fishers - and on each other - in what sounds like a sort of sharks-gone-mad sort of way, so they tend to be quite feared, and then of course destroyed with the wrath we reserve for those things that show us up as vulnerable.

the purpose of this documentary, though, was to recast the humboldt as a gentle giant that only attacks when provoked (for example, by the fishers that are thinning their ranks in a rather barbarous fashion). otherwise, the squid show a remarkable level of playfulness, curiosity, peaceability, problem-solving ability, cooperative behaviour, and communicativeness. in short, the humboldt, cast in the right light, might look a lot like us.

i suppose it's kind of naive on my part to be moved by this. i remember years ago hearing a quirks and quarks show about the play behaviour of octopuses (octopi?) and thinking that i really had to reconsider my selective pescevegetarian stance (i did, though not the way i had intended... instead of dropping the pesce part, i dropped the vegetarian part).

i'm not entirely sure what i'm musing about here - only that it really does seem alarming how divorced most of us have become from the means of our food-getting. and how, in becoming so, we've also moved away from an understanding of other animals as sensate, let alone cognate. i know i'm guilty of this kind of thinking, if only as justification for my weakness for the 25 cent chicken wing... which makes me feel pretty crummy. not to mention cheap.

and while i love the stuff i stumble on on the discovery channel, it almost always presents what is for me, moreso than it is for my friend jen, who posted in a similar vein yesterday, a struggle with the moral quicksand that underlies my gustatory carnal pleasures. so thank you, discovery channel. thank you, humboldt squid. even if i don't end up riding the vegetarian bandwagon again, i'm glad of the reminder of the agreement implicit in my love of sushi, in that whopper i crave at least once a month, in that brilliant lamb tibs at the queen of sheba. sigh. i expect i'll be flailing around in the quicksand-space for a time to come yet...


the beatles - octopus's garden