I'm vegan and this is so obviously not an issue ethically. Never mind that vastly more plants need to be harvested to feed livestock, this is a chemical response that is in no way similar to the pain an animal feels.
Go cut your lawn and then kill baby cow and try to tell me it's the same.
"This is a chemical response..." As opposed to sensation of pain, which is a also chemical signal? All sensation is chemical signaling. In fact all your experience of life. Us the result of chemical signaling. (Like dopamine, Serotonin, etc)
I agree with everything you said, it's just that this was a terrible argument.
Interesting, as explained in the article the smell (VOC) we would experience of a newly cut lawn would technically be the cries of the plants. So other plants see it as a warning and they bolster their defenses. Ain't that no different from a baby cow being killed slowly probably through a predator. It would communicate through cries. Making similar animals interpret this as a warning perhaps making them react by running away or fighting back. Maybe we don't see the VOC as act of cry because we simply don't have any idea how to process it, since we're not plants. Though we could argue that plants does not have consciousness as we're aware of while animals do.
Edit: anyways not trying to question your choice of veganism, I think it's a noble choice. I just wanted to share my thought on that statement you mentioned.
I'm talking about the actual morality of it, nevermind the sustainability and health difference.
You're likely not being honest if you think you'd feel the same killing a baby a cow as you would cutting the grass.
Plants don't have a brain to process information, they are releasing these chemicals as an innate response. If you've ever spent time around cows or pigs you'd know there's little difference between their ability to feel and think from a dog.
All I've learned from this comment is that "you don't know what you don't know" and you're mad that others are being open-minded to things that are unknowns.
You can't factually assert animals and plants are different but "they just are" despite the answer being beyond the horizon of current science.
If you had said, "the lack of a brain as we understand it," maybe. But you are too certain about unknowable things for me to follow your reasoning.
vastly more plants need to be harvested to feed livestock,
i don't think this is true. many breeds are ruminants, and no plants are harvested for them at all, as they graze. i don't think it's strictly true that any plant ever needs to be harvested to be fed to livestock.
Do you really think the majority of slaughterhouse animals are grazing? Grocery store and fast food meat comes from animals that live on corn, soy, etc feed, which is why places like the Amazon are being destroyed to grow crops.
I see comments like this and realize something is defederated for my instance somewhere and I’m missing half of the conversations OR half of y’all need to up your dosage 😂
What I've stated is not baseless. There are many sources and studies claiming how plants communicate via root systems, pheromones, and other mechanisms (some we're discovering continually). As someone who worked in forestry (and lived on a non-corporate farm that produced mostly alfalfa), it’s somewhat more apparent once you’re there and present in that world.
You can find many more if you look. We’ve known for quite a while that trees do this, and fungi are absolutely notorious for this. Speak to a botanist (or read the articles above) and they'll tell you that plants respond to warnings from their peers about dangers, brace for pain, and signal pain to others.
To be clear they don't seem to feel pain (but keep in mind that they said this for years about crustaceans as well, but it was simply because we didn't know how they functioned well enough) - not understanding the pain does not mean there is no pain.
Life for some organisms means death for others. Period. You can not avoid it on a micro or macro scale, all you can do is change WHAT you kill.
Plants are cool as hell though I suppose that understanding the above means that it can fuck with the worldview of vegetarians, and nobody likes that. If you disagree, please be respectful and let me know what your reasoning is.
My dude I didn’t see what you were responding to, that’s what my comment was in reference to.
On a lot of posts I see what appear to be responses but not what they’re responding to. So if you take your comment that I responded to entirely out of context and made it a top level comment you may see what I mean, idk if the comment you’re responding to is defederated or what.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said in this comment chain, except the part about everything that's currently alive being sustained by the auffering of some other living thing...the very plants we're speaking about get their energy from a combination of sunlight and air (specifically carbon dioxide). AFAIK, we haven't found that soil reacts to having nutrients extracted, and the sunlight and air are there anyway. So, if any organism can look down on us for our cruelty, it'd be the non-carniverous plants ;)