Plants Feel Pain and Vegans are Cruel!
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Paul Watson, Founder, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
June 2015

For those who say it’s a life style choice all I can say is that the living, feeling, sentient beings that are eaten, it is not a choice for them. Slavery was once a life style choice but not for the slaves. There were people who chose to own slaves and those who chose not to and the slave owners were always quick to point out that it as traditional and a matter of personal choice.

Raising plants requires water also but much less. By replacing the plants cultivated for animal feed there would be more land to cultivate for plant production for humans. Presently more land is used to grow crops for non-human animals than for humans.

It does come down to numbers and human population escalation must be stopped. Unlimited growth defies the law of finite resources. We are presently stealing the carrying capacity of other species and as a result we are now in a era called the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction event in human history.

Human society will have to adapt to a sustainable vegan diet or our societies will collapse. Our present blind consumer society is killing the biosphere, killing the life support system of the planet.

One of the strangest justifications that people have for eating meat is to say, “well plants have feelings, plants feel pain, therefore it’s just a cruel to eat plants as it is to eat meat.”

Humans of course have a seemingly infinite capacity to justify their own cruelty.

Meat is an addiction. I know because I was once an addict. Even now the smell of a roasted chicken makes me feel like a recovered alcoholic walking by an Irish pub.

I’ve heard all the arguments from the excuse that God designed us to eat meat to the lament that they need to eat meat because they tried a vegan diet and their health deteriorated to the most ridiculous justification of all that being the horrific cruelty that vegans inflict upon innocent plants.

What astounds me is that those who claim that plants feel pain do not hesitate to eat plants, or the animals that eat plants. They hold the position that eating plants is cruel yet they willfully participate in the infliction of cruelty. This is not difficult to do when you already accept the infliction of cruelty to animals.

Yes there is evidence that plants respond to outside stimulation. They respond to music, they respond to heat and cold, to fire and even to damage to their cell structure. We know that trees can communicate with each other through chemical signals. For example trees attacked by a virus or a parasite relay information to trees further away that allows for the other trees to produce antibodies to defend themselves.

Plants are remarkable living organisms. The most remarkable thing about them to me is that they literally eat the light from the sun and produce their own sugars. They feed themselves using water, light and nutrients from the soil.

They also form symbiotic relationships with fungus, bacteria and insects.But they do not stop there. Plants are intimately connected to the animal world all the way up to the large mammals like elephants, sloths and humans. We need plants and they need us.What plants need from us most for is sex and towards that end they work hard to attract animals including us. In other words plants want us to eat them.You won’t find many animals that wish to be eaten.

Flowers and fruit are the two things that plants use to court and attract animals from insects to humans. It’s interesting that humans also use flowers and fruit to court members of the opposite sex.A flower is a signal to a bee to come and have a sweet drink of sugar and in return little packages of pollen are given to the bee to be delivered to other flowers. It all begins with the flower. Flowers have male parts called stamens that produce a sticky powder called pollen. Flowers also have a female part called the pistil. The top of the pistil is called the stigma, and is often sticky. Seeds are made at the base of the pistil, in the ovule.

To be pollinated, pollen must be moved from a stamen to the stigma. When pollen from a plant's stamen is transferred to that same plant's stigma, it is called self-pollination. When pollen from a plant's stamen is transferred to a different plant's stigma, it is called cross-pollination. Cross-pollination produces stronger plants. The plants must be of the same species.

But how does pollen from one plant get moved to another? This is where animals are recruited by the plants to act as the go-between with each other.

When animals such as bees, butterflies, moths, flies, and hummingbirds pollinate plants they are not doing it for nothing. They are not intentionally trying to pollinate the plant. They have no idea that they are being used as a surrogate sex partner by the plant. The plants however know in whatever way a plant can know just exactly what they are doing. The animal wants food. The plant knows this somehow. When the animal responds to the attraction which is like a big MacDonald’s sign saying “eat here” the animals come to the plant for a free meal.

It’s not really free of course because the plant has a job for the animal. That job is to take nector and pollen that is made at the base of the petals. When feeding, the animals rub against the stamens and get pollen stuck all over themselves. When they move to another flower to feed, some of the pollen is transferred to a different plant. Not all plants are cross-pollinated by animals. Many plants are pollinated by the wind. And it is in this fact that we see the role of scents and colors.

Plants that are pollinated by animals often are brightly colored and have a strong smell to attract the animal pollinators. These plants also stagger the release of pollen to attract different types of animals at different times of the year.

Plants that are pollinated by wind often have long stamens and pistils. Since they do not need to attract animal pollinators, they can be dully coloured, unscented, and with small or no petals, since insects need not land on them.

So plants can be classified as seductive plants that need animals and independent plants that do not.

Some plants also have a need to distribute their seeds and for this they need to attract larger animals. To do this they offer a gift of fruit. The animal eats the fruit and defecates the seeds many metres or even kilometres away. In this way plants have created an efficient transportation system to maintain their reproduction.

My position on the definition of intelligence is the ability live in harmony within an eco-system and the ability to adapt to changing conditions and to manipulate the environment to serve the best interest of the species. By this criteria plants are intelligent. They may not have a brain but they have a chemical and electrical system within their cells that responds to outside stimuli and adapts.

Animals eat plants but plants decide who will eat them. Some plants are toxic to some animals but not to others.

An apple tree gives an animal like us a gift of food. The animal then distributes the seed of the apple. But before it gives us the apple it produces flowers to attract a pollinator. Thus the bee is the pollinator and humans are transporters. In other words, both the bee and the human work for the plant and both are paid for their labour. The bee gets nectar and the human gets an apple.

Thus it is that the apple tree wants the apple to be eaten.

Earlier this month I ate a celery stalk. I took the base of that stalk and planted in in soil and now I have a new stalk of celery growing in the pot.

You can eat a plant and the plant will regrow. There is no animal anywhere that you can eat any part of it that will be beneficial to the animal being eaten.

Now it can be argued that a wolf contributes to the strength of the caribou species by eating the weak and the sick amongst the herd. There is a valid prey predator relationship that is beneficial to both the meat eating predator and the plant eating prey.

However humans have never been apart of this prey predator relationship because we do not strengthen the herd of another species by predation. Instead we tend to take the strongest and the healthiest animals through hunting and thus that contributes to weakening the herd.

It is true that domestic species have thrived in numbers although not in quality of life because of human intervention. The same holds true for plants. Unfortunately our cultivation practises have damaged diversity and replaced diversity with a small number of plants and animals that we now depend upon.

Humans have never been carnivores. Ancient hunting gathering societies were opportunistic scavenging societies. They existed on what opportunities presented themselves and the creation of weapons increased those opportunities to kill larger animals.

Carnivores gorge on organs and fat often leaving muscle tissue to the scavengers like vultures and hyenas. Scavengers like dead meat and are mainly immune to the toxicity of decaying meat. A lion likes his meat fresh, hot and bloody. A hyena likes it to be semi rotten. Carnivores after eating require a great amount of water and many hours of sleep.

Humans meat eaters today are primarily necrovores. In other words, eaters of dead flesh and in our case the animals we eat can be dead from many days to many years.

I have been in meat markets in Brazil and in Senegal and other places and no Westerner that I know would eat the greyish green and blackish brown flesh that is usually covered with flies. We cover this up with a red dye made from crushed beetles and spray it with bleach to keep it from decay. The meat you see on most supermarket shelves is disguised from it’s natural appearance.

The bottom line however is this. You can’t describe 7.5 billion land dwelling hominids as hunters in a world of diminishing wildlife and devastated eco-systems.

Our species are more like locusts devouring everything in our path. Every year we kill and devour some 65 billion land animals and tens of billions of sea animals. We give nothing positive back. Instead we return toxins, plastic, and numerous forms of pollution.

If every Australia were to exercise their “right” to kill a kangaroo or every American their “right” to kill a deer, both species would be gone within a year.We are eating the world alive.

Meat production is the leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, the leading cause of groundwater pollution, the leading cause of dead zones in the ocean, the leading cause of freshwater loss in the world, the cause of forest destruction in the world and the leading cause of many diseases.

And in response to this I get tossed the question of, “well plants feel pain also.”We are also told that vegans suffer health problems. I hear this but I have not seen it and I’ve lived with veganism for many years. My ships are vegan and my crews are healthy.

But where do you get your protein? From plants! Plants provide all the protein we require.

But where do you get B-12? B-12 deficiency is as much a problem for people who eat factory farmed meat as for vegan because the way that factory farmed animals are raised tends to deplete B-12 in their bodies. B-12 supplements are available but one of the primary causes for lack of B-12 is that for tens of thousands of years we ate dirt with our food and B-12 is readily found in soil. B-12 deficiency is a problem for everyone and not just vegans. Vegans are in fact healthier in many ways for taking B12 supplements than meat eaters who believe they are getting B-12 when they are not.

There are some who said that they were vegans or vegetarians but that their bodies needed meat and they were getting sick. Improper vegan diets will cause any problems that any improper diet will cause. The hormones, antibiotics, uric acid and heavy metals in meat and fish cause much more health issues than veganism. I know that people who eat meat like people who hunt tend to get fiercely defensive in response to the subject of veganism. They take the very existence of vegans as a personal affront to themselves. Some say this is because of deep seated feelings of guilt. I see it as the natural response to an addiction.

Domestic animals have replaced wild animals. 50% of the biomass of wild species have been removed since 1950. Over 40% of all the fish and plankton taken from the sea is fed to pigs, chickens, domestic salmon, fur-bearing animals and house cats.

It takes 600 litres of water to produce a hamburger but Greenpeace advises us to take short showers to conserve water. They never advise not eating a hamburger. One hamburger represents two months of short showers. Six hamburgers represent a year’s worth of short showers.

But to many that does not matter. The planet may just have to suffer because too many people just simply love their cheeseburgers more.

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Plants Feel Pain and Vegans are Cruel! An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

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Plants Feel Pain and Vegans are Cruel!
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org