It's funny to me because it reads like a satire of non-vegans, but this is literally how most of them are.
The arguments of non-vegans aren't meant to sway vegans. They're meant to sway themselves, and an argument doesn't have to be good to convince someone of what they already want to believe.
Idealism vs. Materialism in a nutshell. "Plant rights" and "universal principle of non-use"
We have big tractors to plow or fields in the west but most of the world still gets their vegetables the old fashion way, animal labor.
Wait till this person learns about migrant labor in the USA and where their fucking vegetables came from. All carnists are idealists, veganism is the only actual science here.
how is a society of nearly 8 billion people supposed to feed their families with animal use?
I'm always saying this!
I do kind of give them credit for thinking about this in term of animal labour isn't vegan, honestly. It's not a great point all in all but I bet we can get this person
I'm pretty sure "with animal use" is a typo, by the way. They meant to say "without animal use."
It is, yes, but it makes that whole post even more hilarious
Okay this is a wild idea but what if we took a bunch of seeds of edible plants and put them all in one place. Then once they've grown, we pick them all at once. I'm pretty sure that as long as we save the seeds those plants produce and plant them for the next year, we can keep doing this year after year.
”And then we feed the plants to animals so we can eat the animals?”
”I dunno, that doesn't really make sense to me, we could just eat the plants.”
"What, you mean just directly get the plant calories without putting them through a Rube Goldberg torture machine first?"
Gotta watch a living animal grow so you can put out the lights in its eyes and then you can have those calories
I learned this shit in 8th grade biology.
begging liberals to read about the 10% rule of ecology.
Eating meat is literally part of why the planet is collapsing.
I think this one post just filled out my bingo card.
It's missing my uncle's farm but yes still about as dense with memes as lentil loaf is with protein
It’s also missing the bit about vegans killing bugs with pesticides.
look at the big brain on that poster.. glad they put so much thought into it so we don't have to
never trust the words that come after "honestly" or before "but"
That doesn't even get into the ideas around plant rights, plants are literally living thinking things so why is it okay to use them
I agree, agricultural practices should definitely be changed so that plants and the animals in their ecosystems are being treated ethically.
I don't know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.
Plants aren't sentient, but regardless, this person bringing up "plant rights" is just a deflection. We could handle environmental issues far better if we get rid of the nightmare that is animal agriculture, as that is fucking up the planet more than anything else. Natural ecosystems would be better for both plants and animals because we'd be without the problem of clearing vast amounts of land to grow crops to feed animals who are also responsible for a shitload of carbon emissions.
Plants aren’t sentient
that's actually fairly contentious, some researchers argue that they might be
though my answer to the "what if plants turn out to be sentient after all?" thing is i'll cross that bridge when and if we get to it
We conclude that claims for plant consciousness are highly speculative and lack sound scientific support.
A few "experts" who arrive at their beliefs off of vibes rather than science may say they support the notion of plant sentience, but it's not taken seriously as a scientific idea.
Non-vegans also don't believe it. If anything, they just throw it out as a disingenuous excuse to alleviate guilt.
Something I ask non-vegans who say this stuff [NSFW]
If plants are to be sentient and that therefore makes exploiting animals for food and eating plants morally equivalent, would you consider using a cucumber as a sex toy to be morally equivalent to bestiality?
In every case, they dodge the question and act as if they don't understand the relevance.
the "experts" are botanists, they aren't like just random people and the idea has been published in scientific journals
and yeah, of course non-vegans are being disingenuous, that's what they do
Can you a cite a source, though? I've seen non-vegans cite sources and arrive at the wrong conclusions because they misinterpreted the sources. For example, they think that responding to stimuli is an indicator of sentience, but it's not. I feel like you are assuming far too much good-faith when it comes to this debate about plant sentience. Just because an idea is discussed and seems controversial doesn't actually mean that it's truly contentious with in a scientific context. Not all "debates" are genuine, and not all "controversies" are scientifically valid, and this is really just a "We have to validate both sides" kind of framing. Can you please demonstrate to me a single reputable botanical source that endorses plant sentience?
I don't know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.
They most likely are not sentient, as we currently understand or can perceive, though the complexity of the networks formed within a forest might, might, allow for something like it in aggregate. Consciousness is deeply strange, for something that should be so familiar.
But as Angel says, here it's just a paralytic deflection. Like saying that eating plants is stealing from the animals that could eat them, therefore we're already sinners, therefore we might as well sin some more.
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