Stories2 min(s) read
Published 16:33 06 Aug 2021 GMT
A British supermarket has come under fire from animal rights activists after selling an octopus for just 50 cents.
Justin Webb, 41, a charity worker and vegan, took a picture of the octopus on sale at Morrisons in Eccles, near Manchester for 36p (50 cents).
He later posted the picture on Twitter on August 3 with the caption: "36 pence for a dead baby octopus, one of the most amazing creatures to ever swim the seas. I swear we do not deserve this world."
The tweet did not go unnoticed at the time of writing as it has received 45.6K likes and 6.6K retweets.
Justin followed up his original tweet, writing alongside an angry emoji: "And in 20 minutes time, it will be thrown in the bin like trash."
As per the Mirror, while the octopus was advertised as a baby, it was actually a mature specimen from a small species of the animal.
Reacting to the cut-price octopus, one Twitter user wrote: "This is so sad and so wrong."
A second added: "We are a virus."
A third wrote: "Awful, isn't it? They are as intelligent as cats & dogs, playful, inventive. We humans just plunder, exploit, destroy, eat what we don't need. Sad world."
A fourth pointed out the inherent specicism behind the image, writing: "If this were a cat, the entire Internet would run out and burn the store down."
Meanwhile, a fifth admitted: "Some years ago I admit that I used to cook Puglian octopus stew. But when I heard about their intelligence, I could not bear to eat them again."
Justin continued in the comments section of the tweet: "We should be angry. The poor thing was priced at £1.41 to start with, which is offensive in the extreme for a living wild creature.
"To then see it marked down adds insult to injury. We've moved her from her home to the rubbish bin. Unforgiveable."
According to National Geographic, there are around 300 species of octopus in the world, and they can be found in almost every ocean.
They have been praised for their remarkable intelligence, which they have developed over thousands of years to help them evade predators through techniques such as camouflage.
