Plants probably also feel pain then, considering that they modify their behavior after injury, seek to avoid them, and chemically communicate with other plants to protect themselves. Life is life, no matter if it’s speaking, clucking, mooing, or photosynthesizing, it’s just a matter of where you draw the line.
When you applied to be a part of Beehaw you agreed to be(e) nice. Your comments here are NOT nice. Please remember our ONLY rule.
I take it you eat plant based to minimise suffering then, as well as cry when a lawn is being mowed?
Not at all; as stated in my comment, the debate is not about whether a given creature experiences pain and works to avoid suffering, but rather where you draw the line on what level of suffering is acceptable. I personally avoid buying meat products from the store because I feel that factory farms are inhumane and unsustainable, but I’m willing to and do raise and harvest meat birds for my own consumption.
Judging by your comment history, you do eat plant-based, and that’s pretty cool. I encourage you to share some of your favourite plant-based recipes in this community :)
It sounds like you are basing how fine it is to hurt someone for pleasure (and that is all it is at this point) on how similar they look to you rather than any principled understanding of behaviour and neurology.
This is called speciesism and is just another manifestation of the cognitive failures that lead to most evil in the world.
It is absurd to equate grass releasing hormones that cause the production of bitter compounds with electrocuting a chicken. That is like saying steel feels pain because because it emits sparks when ground or that an amputated foot feels pain because nerves send signals for a while. Pain requires perception, we obviously have no test for an inner listener but we can compare behaviour.
This is after all why you believe I am a real person and not a sophisticated automaton.
The only real behavioural difference we can find between us and birds for example is possibly language. Parrots and corvids there is some evidence they can do language, rather than communication. Even so it’s absurd to use this as a line for acceptable suffering as you would essentially be arguing that human infants and humans with certain cognitive differences were acceptable to kill for meat.
The problem with isms is that you can’t draw meaningful lines around the world if you start from a conclusion and work backwards (in this case, animals other than humans are sometimes ok to eat). The moment you start trying to defend it you are forced to confront that the position isn’t reasonable but rationalised.
I suspect you know this, because you feel some degree of guilt and are throwing out statements like “plants feel pain” which have the objective of winning an argument rather than finding truth.
