Petition: The World’s First Octopus Farm Was Scrapped in July. Nothing in Law Stops the Next One.

On July 23, 2026, the Spanish seafood group Nueva Pescanova formally withdrew its application to build the world’s first commercial octopus farm at the Port of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. The plan was for a 50 million euro facility covering more than 50,000 square metres, around 1,000 tanks, producing roughly 3,000 tonnes of octopus a year. That is about one million animals annually, and more than a tenth of Spain’s entire octopus catch. After five years of opposition, it is dead. And nothing in law prevents the next one. Please sign the petition urging the EU to ban octopus farming outright.

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Read the withdrawal letter and the reason for celebrating gets more complicated. Nueva Pescanova framed its decision entirely in commercial and regulatory terms: the regional environmental assessment body changed the conditions, timetable and scope, so the project was no longer viable. The statement says nothing about animal welfare. Spain has not banned octopus farming. The company has said it would not rule out trying again elsewhere. What actually stopped this farm was a planning process, and planning processes can be satisfied. The science, meanwhile, is not ambiguous. A review coordinated at the London School of Economics drew on more than 300 studies and found very strong evidence of sentience in cephalopods, and its authors concluded that high-welfare commercial octopus farming under intensive conditions is fundamentally impossible. Separate peer-reviewed work found octopuses avoid places where they were hurt and prefer places where they received pain relief, which is the behavioural signature of felt pain rather than reflex.

The specifics of the plan explain why scientists reacted the way they did. Octopuses are solitary and prefer darkness; the farm would have held them in groups under constant light. Earlier attempts at octopus aquaculture failed repeatedly on aggression, cannibalism and self-mutilation, with experimental mortality around 20 percent. The animals were to be killed in an ice slurry at minus three degrees, a method the World Organisation for Animal Health says produces poor welfare and which the Aquaculture Stewardship Council argues should be banned unless animals are stunned first. And here is the gap the petition is actually aimed at: invertebrates are not covered by any EU farm animal welfare legislation at all, so a farmed octopus in Europe currently has no legal protection of any kind. The UK closed part of that gap in its Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In the US, Washington and California have banned commercial octopus farming outright, bans are pending in seven more states, and the bipartisan federal OCTOPUS Act from Senators Whitehouse and Murkowski has been endorsed by more than 100 scientists writing in Science. Europe has done none of it. One Green Planet has written about why factory farming produces cruelty as a matter of routine, and the withdrawal is reported by Gizmodo. A ban is the difference between winning once and winning permanently.

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