"Know" is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it's not like you're killing an animal.
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It's always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by area, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by mass. The idea that those organisms don't "think" in some way is laughable.
Huh, neat.
We don't know how consciousness works enough to say they don't. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
They don't have muscles either, but some plants are known to uproot themselves and fucking move.
Yeah, plants aren't stationary. All plants move, just very, very slowly compared to animals. Looking at time lapse videos of vines growing, reaching out for something to grab on to and stuff is pretty neat. They kind of whip around in circles until they feel they've hit something worth grabbing onto.
We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
Hmm sorry but no, there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness. This is a nice explainer on consciousness, note that it’s not saying anything about needing a brain to exhibit those traits
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#DesQueWhaFeaCon
correct me if I am misremembering sth
We can't say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
Isn't that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
Some misguided monsters, yes.
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don't know or care of their friends start dying.
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don't have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can't kill them directly before boiling them.
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
No, vegans aren't eating fish or seafood.
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you're just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
Lemmyworld admins be like
Let's assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That's an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
This logic doesn't make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it.
Or maybe there's happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don't kill ourselves this decade or the next.
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these "facts of life".
unless the point is that consciousness is not a disqualifying trait to become food
It wasn't for the donner party.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
The cow meat is already there, in the store. Individual choices do not affect the climate. It is disrespectful to not consume it.
demand and supply are a thing
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
You think they don't? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn't it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include "bAc0Nnnnnn!" and "I'm gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless".
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with "you can't take away my gas stove, i'm just going to burn gas lamps in my home now" and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I'm not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that's what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency.....
BUT manure doesn't just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can't be good for forests though. I guess I'm just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and "composts" can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don't just have to use animal shit. Although it's a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that's not true of most land currently used for grazing.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it's not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It's all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
There's a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
There's no way this won't restart the same argument with someone, huh? Top-tier shitpost, well done.
Thanks, I saw it come across my FB feed and knew what had to be done.
That's why I only eat fungi. It'll be reciprocal eventually.
Fun fact, humans share more DNA with fungi than they do with plants. We share nearly 50% of our DNA with fungi.
Plus mushrooms are the sex organs of the mycelium organism. Just an extra fun fact for free there.
Similarly, I plan on double crossing the mafia so Thin Lips Johnny can chop me up and feed me to the pigs. Circle of life.
I mean if you stretch the definition enough even cells know they are being eaten. they usually respond by "shit this cant be good, I better press this big red button"
Yeah, that's absolutely what keeps happening with these news items. "Lifeform demonstrates reaction to stimulus!"
What will Staples do?
dont get the reference
Is that the browning that goes on on the outside when baking some meat?
Yo fuck that propagandist piece of shit Joe Rogan. Keep him off of my feed.
I'm constantly dismayed to find that brain damaged ape, topping the podcast charts weekly. He's such a disease
There was a Hungarian cult that convinced others that people can survive by eating light. There were some deaths and was quickly shut down, but they exist forever in anorexia-related jokes.
I think you're talking about Breatherism? There've been a couple of those cults all over Europe. It's not particularly popular, luckily, but they often make it to the newspapers, because someone usually dies.
It originates from Hinduism though. There's a another Indian religion called Jainism. These are the monks you see brushing away the beetles before their feet, to not step on them. It's very much about nature and spiritualism and being good. Fasting is a key concept of this religion and the most extreme cases will choose to fast until death to cleanse the world. This is all very spiritual though and takes years of preparation.
Those poor cats. Vegans shouldn't be allowed to own meat.
Dogs taste better anyways. Can’t beat a good Elwood’s steak!
That website is confusing, it doesn't let you order any dog meat. It also seems to assume I would have a problem with the product? Is that a strategy to make me want it more?
Doing this sort of "eating a cow is no more ethical than eating a dog" thing isn't necessarily untrue (although ethics are, of course, a subjective thing) but it does not really convince people not to eat meat. If you are going to argue from an ethics of killing and eating an animal angle, talk about why it is cruel to kill and eat animals that most people who eat meat are used to eating.
Yeah that's an obvious troll response you vеgаn's use
People are well aware of it
Great idea, let's stop re-homing rescue animals shall we?
Ew, Joe Rogan.
Do y'all not eat vegetables too?
Their fault for dressing so sexy
Joe Rogan 🤮
That's not how knowledge works.
Finally we have one thing to pin on like 3 weird vegans.
lmfao this is hilarious
So many vegans taking this 100% seriously lmao
Everything that is, is alive.
Yeah, that's what most people don't understand... People should do some shrooms/LSD to get out of their head and back to their heart.
This would solve most if not all the cognitive dissonance we strugle with every day...
Rogan would know. He has sucking down his own air biscuits so long he thinks they taste great.
Let's go to the extremes here: let's say I'm a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
This is all hypothetical as I dislike snakes and love bacon.
Veganism is a philosophy that calls for reducing harm to animals where practical and possible. You can conjure up whatever hypothetical you like, and if you specifically look for situations where harm to animals is unavoidable, then harm to animals will be... unavoidable, in those situations.
However, the vast majority of choices you'll make that affect the lives of animals don't happen within the context of these sorts of thoughts experiments. You don't have to eat rats or bacon in order to survive. So it's not really relevant, unless you're actually in that sort of situation.
Personally, I simply wouldn't keep a snake as a pet, and if I had one, I'd give it away. The delimma you've presented pits my feeling of wanting a snake against my ethical beliefs about not harming animals, and I consider that ethical belief to be more important. I could always just watch videos of snakes or go see them at the zoo or whatever. But if you did one of those, "You're stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but a crate full of frozen steaks that washed ashore," then sure, I'd prioritize my survival because it wouldn't be practical to avoid them in that situation.
Well sure, but it was all a shit-post comment not actually meant to be taken seriously. I chose a snake for that very reason. Though your comment gave me a ton to think about and was well thought out! Bravo!
Let’s go to the extremes here: let’s say I’m a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
well i mean, snakes are pretty fucking stupid. assuming the snake can digest it properly, and gets the required nutrients, it should be fine.
However we can also consider that mayhaps you live in NYC which has a rat problem, perhaps you should just feed your snake rats instead.
You can tweak this metaphor and get plenty of real life examples. Cats are obligate carnivores. There’s been lots of morons who went vegan and decided their cats could be vegan, too. I’ll leave guessing the outcome of that as an exercise to the reader.
I believe cats can't properly digest the plants right? Probably kills them slowly.
I guess vegan cat owners are doing their Job and eradicating meat eaters from the world. /s
But for real, crazy that some did that to their pets.
Man I was giggling about this a ton of times as it passed by due to the recent admin posting update about all that shit on the deranged vegan sub until just now I realized the comment was from Roge Jogan. Fuck that dumbass and everything he does.
NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL SHITPOSTING VOL. 68
