Comic Strips

I'm gonna go with absolutely.

That's exactly how I feel when someone wakes me up mid nap so yeah.

they obviously have emotions, just a bit less complex ones, but it's pretty clear they're not just robots

Yes

Man, mine go nuts being happy to see us.

Eh, we can leave our cats for a week with plenty of food, etc., and they're still thrilled when we return.

How would you define like us vs similar to us?

Silly vegoon, only the cute animals I didn't want to eat have feelings. The others are unfeeling slabs of meat that is magically created by wholesome farmers being folksy.

I don't eat meat, but the more we learn about plant intelligence, the less I can say with confidence that plants do not have their equivalents of things like pain and emotion. It doesn't help that we have great difficulty defining what emotion means.

But we know a lot about plants now that we thought were animal things. Grass "panics" or "screams" by sending out chemical signals when you cut it as a warning to others of its species that they are seriously injured and danger is coming. That's what the smell of fresh-cut grass is. Sure, calling it a panic or a scream is anthropomorphizing it, but it's kind of hard to describe it in other terms.

We also have learned about "mother trees," which will send resources to their offspring if the offspring let the mother tree know they are in desperate need of them. Which sounds very much like parenting in animal species. There's also lots of evidence that plants can learn from experiences and retain some sort of memory of them in some capacity.

Do I think plants have the same sort of sentience as animals and will I stop eating broccoli? Of course not. But I will still have to admit that at the end of the day, I might just be choosing to cause a different kingdom of life pain and suffering because it's far enough away from my species that I don't consider that to be pain and suffering.

Just don't try to force it on your pets.

Cats are obligate carnivores.

Go banana!