Let's try to be more objective about this. Keeping octopus is an avocation of mine that I'm very enthusiastic about. Because of my interest in octopus, I'm tempted to see this octopus tossing tradition negatively, but that tradition is part of someone eles's avocation, about which they are very enthusiastic. I'm not ready to support criminalizing some other guy's tradition/hobby without some compelling reason, because I don't want anybody to be able to shut down any part of a hobby that enriches my life without a compelling reason. I'm fine with shutting down fire crackers, hazing, shooting guns in the air, etc. because of the obvious risks, but these guys aren't jeopardizing anything more than the feelings of a few people who have made pets out of a food animal.
There are probably a few people who keep pet turkeys, and if they wanted to hand out $500 fines for people who eat turkey once a year as part of a tradition, I would be against it. There are about 300 million Americans who practice that tradition, so the pet turkey people are ignored, but there are only a few thousand (hundred?
) Detroit hockey fans, so they're getting fines. I generally think people should be allowed to do whatever they think enriches their lives, unless there is a darn good reason not to let them do it, and the reason shouldn't ever be that there aren't many of them, and their hobby is goofy. Isn't TONMO a small group of people with a goofy hobby?
These fans, collectively, only toss a few octopus per year, and they buy them dead, by the pound, at seafood counters that sell thousands per year for people to eat. They may be doing a very goofy thing, but they're not hurting anybody, or anything, and I think they have as much right to do it as I have to do the harmless and goofy things that I love to do.