Memes

Animals eat other animals out of necessity to survive. Humans don't need to consume animal products at all to be healthy.

If you pay someone to kill and/or torture an animal, mortality wise that is the same as doing it yourself.

Is this a super hypothetical animal not suffering? Every animal that is any of the following: subjugated, imprisoned, artificially inseminated, branded, murdered, factory farmed, either taken from his/her mother or their offspring taken from them, neglected etc. Suffers. I don't know how much you know about the farming industry, but the vast majority of farmed animals will suffer horrendously and be killed unkindly, unjustly and will before their natural lifespan. Their lives and murder are a real-life hell. Knocking the animals out before slitting their throats doesn't always work. Many, many animals end up taking ages to die while being conscious. Many animals are boiled alive because they didn't get knocked out. But that is just at the point of being murdered.. almost all farm animals up to that point will have suffered varying degrees of mental and physical torture.

I don't know if you are joking about comparing eating plants being the same as eating animals. A lot of meat eaters do seem to make that argument as if it is genuine, so I'll respond to it by pasting a part of a book I read recently about it;

"Firstly and most obviously, it’s important to address the science behind this. A plant lacks a central nervous system, pain receptors and a brain which means that anatomically they don’t have the ability to feel pain.

If we also consider that the primary reason human and non-human animals feel pain is to alert us that we are in danger or are being hurt and that we need to escape the situation that we are in, a plant cannot move and thus any pain would be inescapable, making life torturous for any plant. Which begs the question, why would plants ever evolve such a horribly debilitating and destructive characteristic, as it goes against the fundamental purpose of evolution?

If we now view the “plants feel pain argument” from a creationist point of view, why would a benevolent and compassionate God give such a horrible curse to plants? Why would he allow them to suffer so terribly, if it served no purpose for their survival?

I think part of where the confusion regarding plants and pain comes from is that it is true that they are alive and they conduct various activities at a cellular level, such as tilting to face the sunlight. In fact, plants are capable of doing some truly amazing things, but they do not conduct any activities at a conscious or cognitive level, in essence meaning that plants are not sentient.

I think a really good way of highlighting this to people is to point out that plants react but they don’t respond. A venus fly trap shuts itself on to a fly, not because it is consciously aware that a fly has landed onto it, but because it reacts to the pressure stimuli caused when the fly lands onto it. This is why the venus flytrap will close around anything that triggers this response, including cigarette butts. A cow on the other hand, won’t eat cigarette butts just because someone puts them in their mouth because a cow consciously responds.

If we move past the science of whether or not plants feel pain and concentrate on the ethics of the excuse, I am doubtful that anyone truly believes that dropping a cauliflower into boiling water and boiling chickens alive (something that often happens in the chicken slaughtering process) is the same thing. Nobody thinks that slicing the neck of a cow is similar to cutting the stems off a broccoli, or castrating a pig is similar to peeling a potato. But say the person you are talking to is determined that plants feel pain like animals do - it takes up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh, meaning vastly more plants are killed in the production of animal products than they are vegan products. On top of this it’s important to note that up to 91% of Amazon rainforest destruction is due to animal agriculture, meaning that millions of trees have been and continues to be destroyed because of our consumption of animal products.

So if the person you are speaking to truly believes that plants feel pain and are sentient, then remind them that by consuming non-vegan products they are not only causing the suffering of animals but also causing the alleged suffering of huge amounts of plants as well. To be honest, if this excuse comes up I often avoid talking about the science of whether or not plants have the ability to feel pain as sometimes people will say, “but science has only gone so far” and they get stuck with that point. Instead, I often just go straight into talking about the amount of crops killed for animal products, so perhaps try asking: “For the sake of discussion, let’s say plants do feel pain, are you aware that it can take up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh, so vastly more plants are murdered for animal products than they are vegan products?” You could also ask, “If you were driving down the road and a dog jumped out in front of your car, would you swerve onto a bed of flowers to avoid hitting the dog?” - this reinforces in people’s minds that there is morally a difference between non-human animals and plants, as in that situation we would always choose to avoid the dog and instead hit the plants"