- I called a corpse a corpse (post contains multiple pictures of chests of multiple animals)
- Get called loud, obnoxious and ridiculous
- User types 380+ words on why my view is ridiculous (see linked post for more of their comments, my only two comments are in the image)
- I replied in an annoyed tone but did not use insults
- I am banned for “rule 1, be kind”
Post (TW: animal corpses): https://lemmy.world/post/45494863/23173926
Note: “the rules of this site” in my comment refer to rule 6 of lemmy.world which states:
No visual content depicting executions, murder, suicide, dismemberment, visible innards, excessive gore, or charred bodies. No content depicting, promoting or enabling animal abuse.
We don’t know what consciousness requires to manifest (nor really even what it is), so ruling out plants having any level of consciousness just because they don’t have animal neurons is an opinion, not a fact. There are electrochemical signals happening within them, so it is entirely possible they perform similar functions to an animal nervous system without having any neurons.
Many animal behaviours could also be argued to be reactive. Particularly, if we reduce learning behaviours in plants to mere reactions, then by the same logic it could be argued that learning behaviours in simple animals (like, say, lobsters, which have 1/10th the number of neurons a cockroach does) are also just complex reactions.
I’m not saying this because I really believe plants are conscious or sentient (i.e. capable of sensing in a way analogous to humans or complex animals like, say, dogs or cows). I’m saying it to illustrate how with our present-day knowledge any moral line we draw is going to ultimately be arbitrary. Excluding complex mammals like cows or pigs from our diets for being too sentient is easy, but the simpler the animal becomes the harder it gets to create objective criteria that excludes, say, bugs, but doesn’t exclude any plants.
Correct, and this argument is the one you want to use with the average Lemmy user. Not because of the moral cost of killing plants or animals, but because of the environmental cost. Most Lemmy users already agree that climate change is a problem, so this argument is an easier sell to them. It is what made me reduce my consumption of meat.
Evidence for learning behaviors in plants is to my knowledge very scarce. And like the article I linked you states about that subject “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. Additionally we know that cockroaches and lobsters sense pain and have an aversion to it. That the screams of a lobster is not just “air escaping”. There still is a lot more complexity to the learned behavior and reaction to stimuli that cockroaches or lobsters exhibit than a sunflower who’s stem grows on the shadier side and reset during the night in order to “track the sun”.
It is somewhat arbitrary very the exact line is, but I don’t think there is much debate to be had that killing animals is unethical. There are very few people who wouldn’t react with horror at the idea of killing kittens and milking the mom dry but somehow for cows this is acceptable?
and that last part is exactly why do not want to make this argument. I don’t want people to go vegan for veganisms sake, this is not some conversion cult where we celebrate and congratulate every little step to indoctrinate them further and further into veganism. We want the focus to be on the oppressed. And to murder less is still to murder.
I wrote at length somewhere else about babystepping but this comment is getting long enough as it is. The core of the argument is that if the oppressor is looking at what they are “giving up” and not at what they are taking from someone else then they are much more susceptible to have holdouts in their habits that still require murder or to “treating themselves” once in a while or to not extend these habits beyond their diet etc. I want the focus to be on the oppressed, this conversation is about them.
The learning behaviour is actually much more nuanced than that. This is one of the main papers on it (the Youtube video I linked earlier puts it in a more digestable format, plus provides some extra context from the main researcher’s talks and other papers).
Basically they took a plant which has a reaction to close its leaves when disturbed and repeatedly dropped its container a small distance, which caused the plant to close its leaves. After only a small number of repeated drops, the plants started reopening their leaves more quickly, and eventually stopped closing them entirely. However, the plants would still close their leaves as normal when a different stimulus of gently shaking their container was presented. They were also capable of remembering the learned behaviour of not closing when dropped for months at a time, and their capacity for learning depended on environmental conditions – when the plants were grown with less light, they learned more quickly.
In other words, it’s much more than a reflex. I would like to note that the “it’s just a reflex” argument doesn’t have a very good track record in general!
The same researcher, Stefano Mancuso, has many other fascinating plant intelligence experiments and is one of the pioneers of the field of plant neurobiology. The pea plant sensing experiment I mentioned earlier is also his work. It is still an emerging field, but the evidence is quite impressive. It also just makes sense when you think about it – there has been so much evolutionary benefit for sensing and learning behaviours in all other life down to the microscopic level that it would in fact be more surprising if similar behaviour didn’t exist in plants.
I don’t think anyone, including the authors, is honestly claiming it as incontrovertible evidence of plant sentience. Personally I think the main takeaway from it should be that learning, sensing etc. aren’t nearly as complicated of a behaviour as we used to think they are, and can likely occur without consciousness or sentience as we humans experience them.
Yeah like I said, the ethical argument is easy for complex mammals. It’s simple animals where it’s hard. I think basically no one, including most vegans, would find any ethical issues with killing a parasitic worm, for example.
I don’t think it is possible to create a clear and objective definition of intelligence or sentience that excludes all plants (and mushrooms!) without excluding e.g. tardigrades, honeybees, silkworms, mealworms, snails, or indeed lobsters. We simply lack the metrics on which to base it. And I believe if we did have those metrics, we’d find that on them many plants indeed “outrank” many animals.
Even beyond the purely philosophical argument of defining a stronger foundation for veganism besides “is it in the kingdom Animalia”, this has actual practical relevance. Certain micronutrients that cannot be gained (or easily gained) from plants would be available in simple animals, which could make them a valuable food source in a world that doesn’t eat chickens, pigs or cows. Simple animals can also be valuable for bioengineering. Conventional non-food uses like silk production are also pretty nice.
This paper is referenced in the one I linked.
The paper that responded attributed most (but not all) of their data to motor fatigue.[1] However I do not have the time to get into the specifics of this case.
And to be clear the complex mammals vs plants is the most extreme case, but we can study the stress indicators of bees, bugs etc. to see that they clearly do not desire to be farmed and can respect this by basic application of consent.
survival instinct is a very common line drawn. Basically if the organism has the capacity to learn about danger and flee, or defend in some other way, then it does not want to be killed. If there is no such survival instinct (and the lack of such defenses or mechanisms to flee would suggest that there was no evolutionary need for it to evolve such an instinct) then it is safe to eat. It is not possible to evolve a complex memory system and survival instinct without the possibility to use it. Since by itself such an instinct (with no possibility to act upon it) would offer no survival advantage. And just to be clear I’m talking about defenses that are pro-active not reactive. That require pattern recognition. Not just “the bark heals itself after a cut” or “the plant closes in reaction to being touched”.
Again with the “it is pretty nice and cool to have”, this is not an argument to inflict pain upon others.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-017-4012-3 ↩︎