This video is horrifying. It is bone-chillingly haunting. It is as harrowing, distressing and genuinely unsettling an experience as purchasing a prepared salad from a major supermarket chain and, upon opening it, discovering that it contains a bag of donkey teeth and a crude Polaroid photograph of your own anus. I say this not to alarm, or to disgust you, merely to warn you about the kind of material we're dealing with here in this video of a Chinese vlogger attempting to eat a live octopus.
The vlogger is apparently known by the moniker "seaside girl Little Seven" - we can only hope that it translates to something more catchy in her particular Chinese dialect. In the video we see this vlogger, this 'seaside girl Little Seven' try to eat a live octopus. As might reasonably be imagined for any self-respecting sentient being in this situation, the octopus had a few stern words to say about this state of affairs.
In a move, that seems to have only come as a surprise to the girl in the video, the octopus - rather than accepting its fate and meekly allowing this vlogger to chew through its actual living body - defended itself. It did this in the only it knows how, by suckling its various limbs to her face and refusing to let go.
Unfortunately, the video begins mid-way through the action, with the octopus firmly suckered onto the woman's face, like a vacuum cleaner caught on some ham.
What is perhaps most initially surprising about the video is how stupidly large an octopus it appears to be considering she was trying to eat the damn thing. While it's not 'big' in the way say a Volvo, or the moon, is - it's certainly large enough that you would imagine any right minded person would think better than trying to eat it while it's still alive.
As she then tries to prise the determined mollusc from her face we see it retain its grip with a strength that can only be commended. It came to a point, toward the end of the video where it seemed genuinely uncertain whether the octopus would eventually relinquish its grip while she pulled at it, or whether it would simply end up pulling the entire right side of her face off.
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When she did eventually manage to peel it away, she was left with a small cut on her cheek, however we can only imagine that, over the next few hours, her skin would've erupted in dozens of tiny, incredibly intense hickies. A situation that would've been incredibly difficult to explain to anyone at the best of times.
"Oh my god, how did you get all those tiny red blotches on your face?"
"Well, let me show this video..."
While it's difficult to sit here and proselytise about the cruelty of eating animals, being a bona fife lapsed-vegetarian, I think we can all agree that eating a live animal that is actively fighting for its very survival as you try and fit it in your mouth is beyond the pale. Indeed, octopuses have repeatedly been shown to display exceptionally high levels of intelligence, with some scientists suggesting they display a similar level of consciousness and cognitive ability as dogs.
So I think we can all agree that everything about this is objectively awful.
