- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
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Scientists learned that plants can feel pain just like animals do, with that in mind, they hooked the plants up to Christmas music on loop.
Can you cite a scholarly source on that? The “scientists say plants feel pain” is a very common point but there’s no actual scientists claiming they “feel pain”
Also 70% of all crops grown in the US (with similar numbers in many other countries) are grown to produce animal feed. So even IF plants felt pain (they dont) going vegan would still be better because itd mean less plants getting “hurt”
That being said, Im guessing you dont really believe this anyways, unless you apologize everytime you trim a plant or walk on grass lol
They send literal pain signals down their leaves when they’re injured, in a system extremely similar to our nervous system; using ion channels. Once the signal is received then the plant knows to put up whatever limited defenses available to them. Grass probably wouldn’t care if you stepped on it because it doesn’t really injure them, though that smell that comes out of mown grass is the horrified screams of agony.
Plants that are routinely stressed will flower much earlier than they would normally in a last-ditch attempt to pass their genes.
I asked for a scholarly source. A youtube reel of someone reading a tumblr post isnt an academic source or anywhere to be getting scientific information from.
Im asking because the wording youre using “horrified screams of agony” is not remotely related to the reality of “plant has some kind of reaction when cut” which is more likely to be what is actually written in whatever scholarly article was the basis for the trash tabloid click bait articles everyone got the “plants feel pain” idea from. But again that doesnt refute any of my other points even if it were true that they “feel pain” (which they dont in any recognizable way)
You genuinely thought I was going to get you a source? Since when in the history of man has a harassing commenter ever actually wanted a source? It’s just debate bro shit so that you can feel intellectually superior. If you want to look into it fine but i’m not playing your stupid game.
You said something absolutely wild, if i said “aliens invented cheese” youd probably want proof. me refuting your points and literally just asking where you heard this information should not have you accusing me of harassing you and “debate broing” you. The reality is you just heard some random thing on the internet, never fact checked it because you thought itd be convent ammo in discussions about veganism. And now youre getting angry because i called you out on that. We all are guilty of doing that occasionally but flying into a rage and being rude whenever you’re called out is a dangerous way to live
Not Mariah Carey!!?!?
We need not have grandstanders in the comments, I eat meat products almost every day. This made me chuckle, because it’s actually funny.
You should watch Dominion and double check if suffering in another is funny.
you should give a trigger warning when you link gore
While it may seem dated now (2005), I prefer Earthlings. No need to watch both, they cover roughly the same topics.
vegan btw
Now I’m curious if plants have enough complexity to their internal experience for it to be possible to be cruel to them or not. One is used to thinking of them as basically inanimate apart from that they grow, but some of them can sort of communicate with other plants in certain ways can’t they?
They are living things. We shouldn’t seek to deliberately cause pain if possible. While I like how stuff like bonsai trees look, I also feel a bit bad for them, wired and snipped in so many places and forced to be grown unnaturally small.
Or people who deliberately carve graffiti into trees with a knife.
Plants and trees have interestingly complex communication networks. We barely understand their microfauna and underground microbiomes that allow forests to grow much healthier and disease-resistant than our backyards. I have a funny feeling we know a lot less than we think we know, like when scientists discovered that babies can actually feel pain, or that dogs realize when they are treated unfairly. Stuff discovered within our lifetimes, lol.
They can detect tissue damage and grow away from the source. So being physically cruel to a plant would definitely affect its growth. And yes, they can also share some types of information and resources with their neighbours.
Well, the first step to this question is the ever infuriating “define cruelty”. It’s easy enough with complex vertebrates who have evolved to socially signal pain, which is almost everything we eat. It’s even easy to extend it to complex vertebrates which hide pain. But it’s hard enough to rigorously say whether something like an invertebrate insect or crustacean even feels pain at all. They certainly have pain responses, but is the qualia of that response in theory internal space recognizable?
It’s not an easy question to approach, but it is an important one broadly.
Let’s say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you’re not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.
Measuring levels of sentience in the context of what’s OK to do to it is an extremely dangerous road to be taking that always ends in eugenics.
Uh, what?
First you say it’s OK to be cruel to one life form because it’s less intelligent, it’s not long before that extends to disabled people. It might sound like hyperbole, but never underestimate the internet’s capacity to steer the ship towards nazi germany when given the chance.
Check out the Joe Rogan episode with Paul Stamets on how fungi allow trees in a forest to exchange nutrients. Dunno if that is classed as “communication” but it still blew my mind.
It was the first Rogan episode I saw and the only good one as it turned out.
There is not really strong evidence of plant sentience. Here’s one paper looking at it:
A. Plants do not show proactive behavior.
B. Classical learning does not indicate consciousness, so reports of such learning in plants are irrelevant.
C. The considerable differences between the electrical signals in plants and the animal nervous system speak against a functional equivalence. Unlike in animals, the action potentials of plants have many physiological roles that involve Ca2+ signaling and osmotic control; and plants’ variable potentials have properties that preclude any conscious perception of wounding as pain.
D. In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness.
E. Most proponents of plant consciousness also say that all cells are conscious, a speculative theory plagued with counterevidence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052213/
Though something interesting and perhaps counter intuitive to note is that even if we realized plants were sentient, a plant-based diet actually involved killing fewer plants due to the lessened need to grow feed (of which most of the energy is lost)
The issue is we as of yet still have no falsifiable or rigorous measurable definition of consciousness. So any reference to something consciousness isn’t doesn’t make a strong case.
I don’t think plants have a conventional consciousness, but I don’t think this study found evidence of something it can’t even structure a good definition of.
It’s from 2016. It became a reality.
This is going to trigger so many broflakes who have made eating meat their whole personality.
And before anybody starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan food at home, but you can pry my cheese out of my cold, dead hands, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.
This going to trigger so many >!cheeseflakes!< who have made eating cheese their whole personality.
And before any body starts screeching, I’m not even a vegan. I do mostly make vegan home at food, but you can pry my cold, dead hands out of my cheese, and I also occasionally eat fish or meat.
You OK there buddy?
I’m just cheeseposting.
Soy is like trying to replace meat with cork. Sure it’s technically a substitute in the sense that you’ve not got any more meat but it’s not really a substitute in the sense that it replaces it in any manner.
Quorn is a much better equivalent. It isn’t 1995 anymore, we don’t need to eat soy, I don’t know why it’s still a thing.
Quorn is expensive…at least near me :( soy can be bought as dry beans for less than 5 bucks a kg. Also everyone can/could grow soy in a flower pot, quorn seems a tiny bit harder no? even though it’s basically made of mushrooms
And if soy wasn’t the better option why wouldn’t cattle-raisers use Quorn?
Finally, having more good options is good :)
And if soy wasn’t the better option why wouldn’t cattle-raisers use Quorn?
I don’t understand the question what does cattle raises got to do with meat substitutes for humans?
Finally an onion article that isn’t likely to become reality
So wait, are they treating the workers horribly, or… Oh, it’s an Onion article.
If it helps, in Argentina they are deforesting large swathes of land and pushing previous owners out at gunpoint just to plant more soy. That’s not an Onion article.
Yes, but what is the soy used for (mostly)?
take a wild guess
feeding animals
It’s worth noting 77% of the world’s soy goes to animal feed. Only 5% of soy goes to soy bean products like tofu, soy milk, etc.
Then, 90% of that feed gets used by the animals to walk around, fart, and generally stay alive until they get slaughtered. Essentially, 70% of the soy crops gets wasted on breeding animals to suffer.
People who genuinely think plant based diets are cruelty free and environmentally friendly don’t know anything about modern agriculture.
Just see the boiling hot greenhouses in the south of Spain. You can see it from space. All jam packed with discount African labour.
And on the environmental side we have clearcutting thousands of acres of forest for farmland, destroying habitats for millions of animals, a continual extermination of many “pest” species for as long as the farm is operational, AND horrifically inefficient irrigation methods that drain the water table of all its juices.
I’ll never say that mass agriculture is anywhere near as bad as mass animal husbandry for the environment, but the people we see around the world who act like there’s no environmental impact are the ones who irk me.
You should assume that any consumption, if not proven otherwise, is not cruelty free and environmentally friendly. The most moral thing to do is to consume less, I guess.
It’s not perfect, but I think that statement is rather misleading. Problems with plant agriculture are multiplied by animal agriculture which relies on it even more to grow crops for feed. Counterintuitively plant-based diets use fewer crops and less cropland compared to animal agriculture due to not loosing energy from feed crops going to creatures who use that energy on their own body function
If the soy beans aren’t cannibalizing themselves out of desperation it’s not authentic enough
Works for hot peppers. The worse you treat them while growing; the hotter, angrier and tastier they get.
Certain vegetables like leeks get buried as they sprout to make the “shoot” part as long as possible.
Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it’ll never reach
Where does the rhubarb get energy then? Does it just rely on stored energy in the seed or roots or something and get given light eventually, or can it actually use tiny amounts of light?
The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.
If you are doing it sustainably, you can harvest the shoots until they start showing signs of undernourishment, then you stop harvesting and let it build energy back up.
Forcing the rhubarb is an option for the shoots you plan on eating, they grow faster and sweeter than if they grow naturally
The plant has an energy reserve underground that is allowed to build up for a year or two before starting to harvest.
Not a botanist, but I’m pretty sure that’s why rhubarb is so sweet. Those energy reserves are mostly sugar, so maximizing the energy reserves maximizes the sweetness, like you note below.
Yeah the rhubarb that people grow in their own gardens without a rhubarb torture cellar is way more sour than store-bought, in my experience.
Rhubarb is grown in near complete darkness, and it screams as it grows towards a light it’ll never reach
Rhubarb cellars are metal. I forgot all about that.
