The topic of cephalopod welfare is receiving growing attention. In the past year, efforts to secure regulatory protections for cephalopods in the United States have gained considerable traction. Dr. Robyn Crook provided comments on this important topic recently to Nature News and Wired Magazine, for stories describing the progress of these efforts, limitations of current knowledge and the imperative to consider the value of planned experiments in the context of potential suffering of the cephalopods involved. The Crook Lab’s applied welfare work on cephalopod anaesthesia, analgesia, husbandry and handling is recognized as world-leading, and we expect it be relied upon heavily in the establishment of US regulatory standards - if and when they happen - because few other labs are doing this work.
We are strongly in favor of efforts to provide welfare protections to cephalopods in research, and our work in this area is aimed at providing evidence for or against specific interventions that are hypothesized to improve welfare, such as analgesic drugs that have been used previously only in vertebrate animals. While it is critically important to identify interventions that work, it is equally important to identify those that do not. Cephalopod research is growing rapidly and the need for evidence to support refinement procedures is pressing. Despite this, there are currently no active funding mechanisms available to support these types of studies.
We continue to work on these important issues, and hope to see more studies in future that will allow cephalopod researchers and regulators to develop rigorous, empirically supported standards for protecting cephalopod welfare.