Plants want to live too?
Posted by erinmonster5 on Dec 23, 2009 · Member since Jan 2008 · 2870 posts
One of Andy's co-workers sent this to him to show him how heartless he was for eating vegetables.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22angi.html?_r=3&8dpc
Yep. Plants are amazing and should be respected and of course "want" to live....that's part of being alive.
However, more plants die to feed food animals than if we just ate the plants themselves. So if you really care about the lives of plants, you should be a veg*n.
Of course plants 'want' to stay alive. Any living thing that didn't would be in a bit of trouble. But I don't see how 'plants have adaptations to keep them alive, therefore we should inflict unnecessary and pain and death on everything that has adaptations to stay alive equally' is a valid argument. I mean, oh, I probably inhale small insects in my sleep, so I should probably go out and shoot a man in Vegas just to watch him die.
And what HF said.
I commented on this article--I think some people want to justify eating meat & just rationalize it any way they can!
this "argument" really irks me...yes, all things not man made live, of course but plants do not make a consious decision to "fight off" these predators and such they just do because it is a reaction, they do not feel in the same sense and for someone to seriously argue this I think is just silly...really just irks me.
Yep. Plants are amazing and should be respected and of course "want" to live....that's part of being alive.
However, more plants die to feed food animals than if we just ate the plants themselves. So if you really care about the lives of plants, you should be a veg*n.
i like this argument :)
What a bonehead argument to try to make (the 'plants want to live' thing, not the points immediately above!)... I think whoever sent that to you just wants to argue with a veg*n, recreationally. Or else it's a really *weak* attempt to rationalize an carni diet.
It's unsupportable on so many levels; besides the INCREASED plant death for flesh-food production (duh!), there are so many reasons that this is a ridiculous argument... 'moving away from negative stimuli' is one criteria for determining life; bacteria do it, viruses do it, anything alive 'wants to live.' It is impossible to leave 'zero' impact on the world, for any living creature; saying 'I want to do the least harm POSSIBLE' means eating as low on the food chain as possible... and that's plants. There's also the issue of design: based on my teeth, intestines, nutritional needs, & stomach acids, I'm eating exactly what I was designed to eat. Just like it's not wrong for a cougar to eat a deer, or a deer to eat grass: herbivorous creatures (like humans!) who eat plants are eating what their Mother (or Father, depending on your theological orientation) designed us to eat! The plant's individual desires don't enter into it. Also, there's an issue of complexity: just like most omnis would agree that killing a cow is not the same as killing another human (just stating the omni view here, not asserting its veracity!), eating a plant is not the same as eating a cow. The more complex a creature's central nervous system is, the more it's aware of what's being done to it, and the more harm you're doing by eating it.
Sometimes, people just like to try to get a rise out of someone by saying stupid things... this seems like one of those times, to me!
Some people choose to eat only fruits and nuts, and seeds so that no plant dies. I believe they are called fruitarians.