Very obvious bait post.
Plants are not sentient. Animals are.
All living organisms show basic reaction to external stimuli. Plants follow that. That does not indicate sentience.
Animals have significantly more intelligence than that. They form bonds, form relationships, mourn, and so on.
No living being except probably photosynthesis driven plankton can live entirely without consuming anything alive.
Recent studies actually show the opposite of “no sentience”. Plants communicate with each other, even across different species and kingdoms. That means certain animals for example can understand signals from plants better than they understand us.
And that’s just communication. The world of life on earth is so much more than the naive human way of thinking. In fact, it’s likely we’ve already encountered multiple different life forms from space already, and we just have no way to know yet.
So please. Jump off the high horse, take off your hat, and acknowledge that the food on your plate has had a very diverse, colorful life. You can still choose not to eat animals. Just like I choose not to eat dogs and cats, some people see them no different to cows, pigs, and plants.
It’s all just nutrients. So respect it.
Edit: Here’s an example of how much we understand what dogs see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf4k0VgCQjg
A pretty detailed discussion on the topic:
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1772&context=animsent
All living beings are capable of responding to external stimuli, both active and reactive. They are capable of basic friend/foe recognition. They are capable of adapting. These are just basic aspects of literally being alive. Even an amoeba can do these things to some extent or the other.
But does that put a turnip at the same level as a dog? It doesn’t in my books.
I’m not any high horse. The field is in it’s very nascent stages. But the evidence so far isn’t supporting the notion. We don’t live in Pandora.
This post is clearly trying to ruffle some feathers.
We don’t know enough about consciousness to know how it works in ourselves; for all we know, plants are conscious too just using different anatomy and mechanisms.
Well no, we might not know how consciousness works exactly, but it’s pretty safe to say that it has something to do with brains. And given that we can say that animals, especially the ones we tend to eat, most certainly are conscious, or more importantly, capable of suffering, it certainly is a reasonable approach to eat plant based instead of animal based, if you want to reduce the suffering you cause.
I’m willing to accept that there might be an experience of being a tree. My food choices aim at the lowest levels of potential consciousness. I am certain that a cow is a conscious being.
The devastation caused by vegan diets is still being figured out but there’s no question that it’s absolutely horrific for the ecosystem as insects are destroyed en masse to serve the needs of the industry.
No one wants to talk about what that does to the web of life depending on it though. It’s buried just like we see with the health impacts of the plant based meats.
Eat food locally grown and limit your meat consumption. Things aren’t as complicated as the media and food industry try to make it seem.
it’s absolutely horrific for the ecosystem as insects are destroyed en masse to serve the needs of the industry.
Don’t livestock consume just as much, if not more, plant matter to support the meat industry as humans would? Sort of a diminish caloric returns, since those calories have to support the life of the meat-creature which then has to support the life of the omnivore?
I would think that vegan diets would be a net-benefit in terms of pesticide and fertilizer use, and that plant-based diets would be more sustainable.
But I’m uneducated in this and haven’t done sufficient research.
Vegans, amirite???
