What About Plants? And the Topic of Sea Creatures

For starters, let me just say that the "What about plants?!?!" question strikes me an awful lot like, "What about the men?!?!" whenever somebody brings up a feminist topic. There doesn't seem to be a genuine interest in the ethical implications of it; it's just a way to distract the question-asker from their own underlying feelings of guilt and threatened privilege.

Now. Ask yourself: do you honest-to-gods believe that cutting up a head of lettuce and cutting up a live, unanesthetized dog is the same ethically?

If you do, let me just say that you don't need to be on the internet. You need to be on a video with the caption, "This is what drugs did to me."

Now, since you likely do not believe that at all, let me ask you: why? Well 'cause, guess what, likelihood is that you don't really think that plants feel pain, just as you wouldn't think that bacteria (also alive by a scientific definition) feel pain. That's an important consideration. Just because something is alive does not mean it feels pain. While I have been told by several now-graduated students of marine biology that, in fact, most sea critters do feel pain because they possess, rather than a central nervous system, a "nerve net", plants have no nerves whatsoever. You can't use oysters as your scapegoat (hah) in this situation.

If there is nothing there to feel pain, if there is nothing there to feel at all, why worry about it? One only needs rights if one possesses emotions; rights only apply to those who will suffer if they do not have them.

Life, liberty, and bodily integrity. These are the three basic, essential rights of my moral code to any being with a self.

"Self" need not be humanlike to be important. Yes, sure, we know that we have selves, and we can recognise them in other mammals, avians, reptiles, amphibians and cetaceans where we cannot so easily recognise them in sea creatures. That doesn't matter; just because someone is different from you doesn't mean that they're unworthy of those essential rights.

However, again, there has to be something there.

Most people who honestly think that there might be a chance that plants feel pain point to the book The Secret Lives of Plants, which contained the results of a "study" (I use this word loosely) on plants that supposedly showed that they feel things and/or think. I'll note here that the author has actually not allowed anyone else to replicate his experiments through the withholding of information about his method, therefore it is extremely unlikely that it was true in the first place.

Another "study" was done on a plant using a polygraph test that supposedly showed "reactions" in the plant with random events. Now, if you know jack shit about polygraph tests, the results might in fact seem plausible. However, I do know something about polygraph tests. They are the so-called "lie detector test" machines, and they rely on the measurements of three physical characteristics that plants do not have: heart rate, skin perspiration, and... damn, I forget the last, but I believe it was muscle tension.

How the hell would you be able to tell anything from a test that depends on criteria that your subject doesn't even have?

But really, let's get back to why we're really being asked this question, which goes back to my first point: this is a distraction. It doesn't really matter if plants feel pain - the ones we're discussing are animals.

First, if you were really serious about plants feeling pain (which you're not), then you wouldn't eat animals because animals need plants to grow and you'd be eating several dozen to hundreds of times the plants that you would need to go directly into your body to sustain you - calorie expenditure, after all - in fact, you would be morally obligated to become a fruitarian so as to never cause plants pain again, which is also vegan.

Second, even though you can't fix everything doesn't mean you can't stop the pain you directly or indirectly cause others through your intentional actions. Or, put another way: just because you can't be perfect doesn't mean you're excused from trying to be better than you are. Life is, as they say, a series of trials and tests. You either grow as a person or you go back to the starting block because you keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

It is, however, the second that leads people to ask this question. So to all of you who have this question to ask, I say:

Stop fucking making excuses and go vegan.

Because the animals don't care about your excuses.

The Plant_Murderer's Plea for Innosence

Hey, This is PM here ( well duh , right?), anyway this is the one that any of you with an overly developed sense of irony have been waiting for.

I, the plant murderer who for safety reasons must remain nameless, do hereby come before the court and plead innocent on all charges relating to the supposed murder of various members of the plant kingdom. In the absence of my lawyer, I cite the following reasons as to why this case should be thrown out and why, if the proceedings stand, I am innocent.

Exhibits A-PM : The definition of the term murder: the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought.
My Defense:
Despite my misnaming moniker ( non-fitting name) it is impossible to murder a plant because a plant is not a person. They don't feel, they dont have a sense of themselves, they don't feel pain. they are not people.

Besides, if we don't eat them the broccoli will take over the world.

Seriously: If plants had feelings then:
walking across your lawn would be genocide.
kids could opt out of flower dissections on moral grounds.
and there would be humanly harvested spinach on sale at Whole Foods.
+
all meat eaters would STILL be more guilty than most vegans.

when you eat meat you support the killing of all the tons of grain that got filtered through the animal prior to slaughter.

I rest my case. So Judge, what's the verdict?

Hoping there's good vegan food in prison,
Plant murderer

PS. The name is my way of being ironic and funny. the joke is that if you've been vegan for a while and told anyone then you've probably been hit with the plants have feelings line, and therefore been accused of being a Plant Murderer.
PPS. Read the other post on this topic, it's good and scientific and wasn't written by a 17 year-old trying to be funny.

What about plants?

This is a question I sometimes hear (though I have no reason on Earth why...).

What about plants? They feel pain too!

Let me take this piece by piece.

First, you have a factually incorrect premise and a logically incorrect premise: that plants feel pain (factual) and that if plants felt pain, and we eat plants, then it's not wrong to eat animals (logical).

The factual premise is wrong, well, because of science and because of common sense. First, the science-y part of it is broken up into three parts: behavioural, evolutionary, and anatomical.

Behavioural: Even mollusks will pull away from a painful touch. Clams will snap closed; bees will start stinging more easily; fish will writhe. Yet, plants do none of these things. Part of the reason that we know animals feel pain is that they show it - yes, even cows, if you know what to look for! Plants cannot scream, writhe, pull away, or move at all to get away from pain. This leads us to the next segment...
Evolutionary: Plants can't move. They can grow, but they can't move. (Corals are, believe it or not, collections of animals, so they don't count.) So why would they have any reason to develop or retain the ability to feel pain? Not only that, but being in pain constantly - say, from being eaten by bugs - tends to send someone into shock, unable to function. All plants that had the ability to feel pain would have died out because they wouldn't have been able to function. Sure, they'd respirate and whatnot, but they wouldn't actually be able to do anything. And that leads us to the last segment...
Anatomical: Yes, surprisingly, having a central nervous system doesn't mean much (mollusks, clams, mussels, etc. can feel pain; they just react to it later because they have a nerve net rather than a CNS); having a nervous system does. One must have nerves that transmit pain to feel pain, as well as the neurotransmitters to feel pain with; and no, the veins you see on plant leaves are not nerves. Das Ende.

Then there is the common sense argument: do you really believe that slicing a lettuce in half is the same as slicing a dog in half? (Hint: if you said "yes" to this, you're lying or off your meds.)

The second fallacious premise - that it can't be wrong to eat animals if plants feel pain and we eat those too - stands on the idea that veganism is impossible to do "perfectly" unless you're dead - it's used as an excuse to not go vegan, and nothing more. All of you out there who are reading this know that, because you've had it used on you or you've used it. But if you do really believe it, think about this:

It kills more plants to eat animals than it does to just eat plants.

Yep, that's right. It's not even, it's not balanced. It takes 10+ pounds of wheat to have a cow pack on a pound of flesh (let's remember that there's a someone in the equation, eh?), three lbs. for chickens. Meanwhile, us vegans are happily chowing down on that lb. of wheat ourselves, while the carnists are eating a lb. of steak and along with it, those 10+ lbs. of wheat. (I'll let someone else do the environmental implications of "grass-fed" cow flesh.)

So, if you're really concerned about plants, the best thing to do is, yep, go vegan! Or fruitarian, since theoretically you don't have to kill any plants to remain on that diet. (Go to http://fruitarian.org for more. ;))

Remember... don't get mad... get vegan!