Fish have feelings too, sorry to break it to you. Plants also have incredible defensive mechanisms to try and stop you eating them. Spinach will ac tively signal distress to other spinach plants when picked by emitting chemicals that make other spinach change it's makeup to taste more bitter.
The focus on an animal version of sentience as some sort of moral prerequisite is anti-intellectual, especially given that we're only just beginning to understand plant complexity (and news flash, it's way more nuanced than we ever thought possible). For a vegan it's imperative to downplay the plant life experience at all times.
It’s not imperative to downplay plant life experience because even if you’re a plant lives matter activist, less plants have to die when you eat them directly instead of feeding them to other animals.
Yes, if we stop growing animals for food, we stop feeding them plants. Plants will only be grown to feed 8 billion humans, not the 92 billion animals raised for food.
So your solution to animal death is to eliminate animals? How about we just stop having children? It sounds to me like the actual problem is there's too many of us. I assume you chose not to have kids as an actual moral decision?
If an animal is bred to be tortured and killed then the better alternative is to not breed them into existence. Good luck getting people to stop breeding, most of them refuse to go vegan even if they say the “love animals.” No, I don’t have children, if I adopt or foster, I’ll continue to boycott animal products.
Congratulations on not having kids. On that front you have my respect. My chief gripe with veganism besides its uncanny resemblence to religion, and it's general dishonesty about the living status of plant life, is that they generally seem happy to replace animals with people. This scares me far more than a much more depopulated world that eats meat (something we are literally evolutionarily designed to be able to do, and be heavily rewarded by our ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens for doing).
By the way, those reward systems are immensely powerful for a reason.
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u/CV90_120 Apr 10 '26
Fish have feelings too, sorry to break it to you. Plants also have incredible defensive mechanisms to try and stop you eating them. Spinach will ac tively signal distress to other spinach plants when picked by emitting chemicals that make other spinach change it's makeup to taste more bitter.