Evo said:
Well, you don't find large populations of abandoned and abused octopodes roaming junkyards trying to survive too often.
Seals get clubbed for their fur in brutal ways, octopodes get cut apart by fishermen because they hold their own the right tot totalitarian-style empty the oceans of all life. Fail to see any difference except that the seals get the activists helping them en masse and the octopodes don't look half as cute.
And can you teach seals to communicate in moderately complicated sign language? I can't, maybe you can.
Humans are visual creatures, no matter how much we hate it, looks outweigh personality by a vast margin to us. The cute girl gets protected by the boys, the cute animal gets protected by the activists.
Also, just to show off my grammar schooled butt: The English word 'octopus' comes into English via Latin, it is a Latinized transcription of a Greek noun, which would nowadays be transcribed as 'oktôpous', academically. The word is most certainly not of the second declension and does not have a plural in -i, for one, the -us is not a termination and also as evidenced by the 'ou' it was a long 'u', Romans weren't always that good in marking the distinction in writing though they did indeed pronounced it and long and short could not only distinguish different words but also grammatical forms. 'oktôpous' is in reality a contraction of 'oktôpods', this is because both Romans and Greeks had troubles pronouncing things like 'ds' and 'ts', the stem of the word is thus 'octopod-' which as you expect means 'eight-foot', as the stem is not 'octop-', 'octopi' is an absurd plural. The correct plural is 'octopodes' in classical form (-es is applied to the stem of masculine third declension nouns) but as that plural might seem alien to people who don't have a grammar schooled butt, various authorities advise to use 'octopuses' in daily life at least—which my grammar schooled butt ignores—the -i plural is a contamination which arose because in Latin, there is a large class of nouns called the second declension which have a singular on -us and a plural on -i for masculine nouns. Though singular on -um and plural on -a for neuter nouns. Indeed, assuming we can just replace -us with -i for forming plurals is a risky thing as besides a fair deal of third declension nouns which contract (genus -> genera, opus -> opera) we also have the fourth declension where both masculine and feminine nouns end on -us and also on -us in the plural, the difference is that the plural form is the long u, not the short. (status -> status, nexus -> nexus). This entire paragraph can be ignored as I am right and there is no debate and it would go off topic and just serves to criticize the pseudo-classical forms of 'viri', 'stati', 'nexi' and so forth. Another good thing to remember is that it's not dogma but dogmata, again because it's bloody greek and not Latin first declension. Any complaints or errors in showing of my classically schooled butt can be directed to my personal message inbutt.
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got to love the bubbles of pure terror!