this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 11 points 10 months ago (23 children)

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?

[–] sirdorius@programming.dev 5 points 10 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] psud@lemmy.world -4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

You can't eat anything in the modern world without killing animals. A combine harvester harvests wheat and mice. A hundred meat eaters are responsible for a single cow death, and the cow lived on marginal land, drinking from streams - you couldn't grow other food on the land (sure some are grown on perfect fertile land, they don't need to be)

Not saying I'm a meat eater, I don't care about mice, but there's blood on all our hands

[–] Tamo240@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago

A quick google gave me

livestock farming is 2.5 billion hectares, about 50% of the world's agricultural area and about 20% of the total land on Earth.

So maybe you should revisit the idea of 'marginal land' that 'couldn't grow other food'

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