The Mysterious World of Octopuses, and The Dirty on Down

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We start the show with chatting about some of our vegan outreach that we did this past week on the “streets” of Vancouver: Jackie helped at a brand new activist initiative – a vegan info table on the busy downtown Robson Street, and Alison participated in ‘Pay-per-view’ vegan outreach at the University of British Columbia, where students got paid for watching a video on factory farming with delicious vegan brownies!

The Dirty on Down

With the all cold weather we’ve been getting in recent months, what’s one to do when you want a warm, puffy, weather resistant jacket to keep you as toasty and insulated as our feathered friends, the birds, are naturally in these types of freezing temperatures? What does a feeble human-being do to stay warm when he or she might have major concerns about how such down jackets are produced, and skeptical that the feathers were humanely obtained?

There is not a lot of advertising going on to consumers about where the down and feathers come from to fill our winter wear (and comforters and pillows), so in this segment, we arm you with the facts about the down industry. We learn that down is not just a by-product of meat production, but that painful and cruel “live plucking” also takes place as a common practise.

We also discuss alternatives to down jackets – alternatives to using cruelty to keep you warm.

Here is an exposé by Peta that shows the practises of live plucking, and other ways that down is obtained from ducks and geese:

The Mysterious World of Octopuses

For our feature interview, we have Dr. Jennifer Mather on the show to share some of her fascinating knowledge about the mysterious world of octopuses. She is a leading researcher on these animals, concentrating on their behavior and personalities and has been publishing articles on cephalopods since 1978. While she is a professor of psychology now at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Jennifer grew up in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where she acquired her lifelong fascination with cephalopods. She prefers to do field research, and has done so in a variety of locations including Bermuda, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.

Jennifer has explored theoretical ideas in areas such as octopus foraging strategies, personalities, intelligence, and consciousness. She is also the co-author of the book “Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate“.

Watch this video to get a glimpse into an octopus’s cognitive ability to problem solve: