You’re a Vegan? So What Do You Have Against Plants?
The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze.
“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.
Full report on eating more ethically.
Good post. I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I eat meat.
Naturally, this is linking back to a largely discredited, hysterical NY Times piece. None of the “sources” cited by Ms. Anger in the piece come anywhere near to making anything even remotely like the headline claim, of course.
Stimulus response isn’t evidence of sentience, any more than intracellular communication within the human system is indicative that individual cells are sentient.
We have to eat; we don’t HAVE TO eat animals.
We can either eat that life which we are *reasonably certain* doesn’t suffer, or we can choose to eat that life which we are absolutely certain *does* suffer, but which we have absolutely no nutritional requirement to consume.
If you’re feeling guilty when you eat meat, there’s a good reason for that, and a very simple solution: stop eating it. It’s unnecessary.
I agree with the above commenter, babble, and would like to add that the lives of far more plants are spared by a vegan diet than a meat-eating one. Do not forget that that meat you eat ate SOMETHING during its lifetime, and most often, that food is plant matter. Many more plants die to feed that cow for your steak than would die to simply feed you directly.
This kind of “journalism” is lazy in the extreme, and I advise you to engage in more extensive research for your next article than you must have for this one.
Vegetarians should realize that broccoli spears and spinach leaves have mothers. It is downright cruel to send this living things down the alimentary canal into a pool of hydrochloric acid. Let them eat cake (sans eggs, of course)! http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com
Forming a committee to study the problem of deficit spending is as good as saying you are going to do NOTHING.
I am also a vegetarian and my body has never been in a very good shape. Being a vegan can really make you much heathier..;’