XVX

Do you actually behave as if you believe that plants are capable of subjective experiences, despite having no nervous system and no brain? This is a serious question. Do you walk on grass aware of the fact that you’re potentially causing pain? Do you think about this when you’re eating spinach? Do you try your best to reduce the amount of “plant suffering” you are supporting through your purchases?

If the answer to all of these questions is no, then you probably don’t actually believe that plants feel pain. Or you do, but that belief is essentially meaningless since it makes no difference at all to your behaviour. If you’re thinking and talking about this exclusively in the context of debates with vegans then you are acting in bad faith.

so, all athletes should immediately stop playing sports. construction workers, anyone with jobs that put them at risk, they need to find different employment. people with uteruses shouldn’t ever get pregnant, either. actually you know what? don’t enter a car or vehicle at all! and don’t even get me started on old people. what age do we think they should just give it up & throw in the towel? 50? 60? after that they become way too burdensome. it’s a problem.

My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.

And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."

One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.

We are facing the largest mass extinction because people refuse to stop BUYING meat. Why do we have slaughterhouses while first nations people are facing food deserts? What you see is genocide and colonialism. Who cares about hunting. A deer died, yeah ok I'm sad but what about the millions of acres of habitat that were clear-cut for settler agriculture? A deer died but there will be more deer; there will be no more nēnē-nui. Turn the corn fields and CAFOs back into rainforests and rivers and grasslands.

I don’t even understand what you’re saying

I was heartbroken and felt tossed aside. I didn't understand why our friendship wasn't worth anything to him if he couldn't have me romantically or sexually. I felt betrayed and dehumanised, like I didn't matter to him as a person but only as a romantic prospect.

When I told other friends about it, to my surprise they all sided with him. "He is heartbroken, it's hard to get rejected" even my THERAPIST said this. It's not like I didn't empathize with him, but wasn't I rejected too? No one else could see that but me, they placed me as some sort of villain that had power over him in that situation, when all I did was set a boundary between friendship and romance. All I did was not consent to the terms he wanted for our relationship, I rejected them, my terms were different and he rejected those.

I've had my heart broken by friends over and over and it hurt the same, if not more, than any romantic heartbreak. Why is friendship undervalued next to romantic feelings?

i desperately need people to stop avoiding what this post is actually about. stop derailing and trying to make it be about something else instead.

THIS POST IS ABOUT ROMANTIC CONSENT.

even if the person in question didn't want to fuck them, even if he just wanted a wholesome, purely romantic, nothing sexual at all relationship, it would STILL be fucked up to BLAME someone for rejecting that.

similarly, if someone really wanted to just fuck, but they were honest and clear about that, and handled rejection gracefully, there would be literally no issue with that.

you'll never believe. whose main blog that post was from. hi, it's me, tumblr user radioactive-yuri, formerly known as thermodynamic-comedian. this is my side blog. and a good few years ago, i made that very post on my main blog.

Then only privilege going on here is being so privileged you believe your taste buds are more important than another individual’s life.

It presumes there is morality in the consumption of living matter. But only in matter they consider relatable to their experience and not in the consumption of living matter that they -don't- find relatable to their experience. Plants SCREAM when they are cut on ultrasonic frequencies. Plants release chemicals to warn the ants that live inside them of the danger when they are harmed. Plants communicate through connected root systems and fungal messengers. But because vegans can't hear it, it's morally okay to eat a plant, but not a chicken, because the vegan can empathize with a chicken but not a plant. Much less the microscopic organisms that live on the plant.

The destruction of environments and populations to sustain monocultures. Yes. Beans like soy and lentils are able to sustain vegans. And in order to sustain a vegan population we need MASSIVE QUANTITIES of them in vast monocultures of plantations which result in communities being priced out of local staples because shipping it to America yields more profit. Add in the potential for global supply collapse due to the spread of hypereffective fungus or other crop-destroying disease...

The people who literally cannot survive on a Vegan diet. Whether due to genetics or later acquired traits, there are folks all over the world who are unable to sustain themselves on a vegan diet. People with Crohn's, for example, often have to avoid foods with high insoluble fiber content and the best possible proteins they can consume are fish or chicken in order to avoid malnutrition.

When someone tells me they're a Vegetarian I go "Oh, okay." and in my mind I know this person doesn't eat meat. Maybe because of dietary restrictions, religious tenets, moral identity, or simple preference.

When someone tells me they're a Vegan I go "Oh, okay." and in my mind I know this person considers themself to be morally superior to me because for them it is an explicit moral position and I exist in a state they consider immoral.

Veganism, by its very structure, is designed around in-group out-group boundary generation with the Morally Superior Vegan in group and the Morally Inferior Meat-Eater out group.

And they hold themselves in that state due to their own ignorance. Because plants do not communicate to us their pain in a way they can personally hear and understand it is okay to eat -that- living thing, but not one that can moo or quack or oink. Because the vegan can hear the moo, the quack, the oink.

Trying to build morality around the consumption of nutrients is, at best, a fool's game based on assumptions and nothing more. And I hate it, deeply.

1: I get that, and considering the life of living things is something I always try to do. It can be worthwhile to consider the ways in which we harm all living beings, not just animals. In fact, Buddhist thought has a lot to say about this, and is a tradition with a long veg history - far longer than any in an english speaking country. However, contemplation on the suffering of the bugs we step on aside, we have to eat. Ultimately, if your concern is for the wellbeing of plants and animals, the answer is harm reduction: how do you consume where the least beings are harmed?

If you look into how plants and animals are used for consumption, reducing animal products is by and large more efficient. We grow mountains of corn and soy, mostly to feed animals. This is a waste of both plant life and human life. If most people were to go vegan, than a lot of the land currently being torn up for both animal agriculture and the monocultures that feed them could be rewilded, benefiting the ecosystem in huge, tangible ways.

Veganism isn't simply a concern for just animals. It's trying to reduce the harm we do.

2: I mentioned this in the previous part, but most of the soy we grow is not for people. The US soybean board's report from the '24/'25 states that ~6 million metric tons of soybeans were used in human food total, most of that for soybean oil. Compare that to the amount used in animal feed: 35.8 million metric tons, about 96.5% of all soybeans used. This is not even accounting for eating the soybeans as their own food or in tofu, tempeh, ect. This falls under "other edible products", and only accounts for 0.4 million metric tons.

3: Yeah, some people can't go vegan. Some people could, but it would be exceptionally hard. This is true. However, most people are not in this camp. Most people can go vegan. They do not want to.

To start with, plants do indeed emit ultrasonic sounds when they are under stress, such as when they are dehydrated or physically damaged. These sounds resemble popping or clicking noises and occur at frequencies that are inaudible to humans, but not to many animals. These are sounds that are the result of a physical process, for example with dehydration, air bubbles form and collapse in the stems of the plant, creating vibrations that result in these ultrasonic noises. These noises are what we mean when we talk about plants "screaming."

Screams in plants are highly unlikely to be the expression of a subjective experience. This is simply a misunderstanding of what scientists mean when they talk about plants "screaming," and honestly, is more often than not the result of reading the clickbait headline but not the study itself... We can't know any of this for certain of course, just as I can't know for sure that you experience pain, but none of the available evidence even implies the existence of subjective experiences in any organism that does not have a central nervous system or a brain.

Compare that physiological response to a stressor, with a scream in an animal. A scream for an animal is a way to alert others of distress, it is indeed likely that plant "screams" function in the same way. They key difference is that in animals, a scream reflects a subjective experience, which is the state of being scared, shocked or in pain. The scream of an animal is not simply an automatic response to a physical process, it is the expression of a subjective experience. Suffering is the morally relevant factor, not relatability, and not empathy.

Plants are complex organisms, and can respond to their external environment in relatively sophisticated ways. Through our recent discovery of what we call "The Wood Wide Web," we understand better the extent to which they can communicate and even share resources with one another, However, we have no compelling evidence whatsoever that plants experience anything even resembling the pain we observe in animals.

I am not aware of any respected botanist who takes seriously the idea that plants feel pain, or a peer reviewed study which demonstrates or even suggests that they do. Plants not only lack a central nervous system or pain receptors, they don't even have nerve ganglia. More fundamentally, plants lack the brain that is necessary to process those signals into a pain sensation, even if those signals did exist. Plants lack all of the biological apparatus we believe is required to experience pain, or any subjective experience of sensation at all. That plants emit sounds and chemical signals is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are capable of subjective experience.

You can disagree with me on philosophical or spiritual grounds, and it is completely fine if you do. That said, it is dishonest to pretend that this conclusion is based on the current landscape of scientific knowledge, or that this is anything other than an unsubstantiated belief. Nothing we know about plants suggests that suffering, or subjective experience of any kind is possible for them, and there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on that.

The implication that the physiological response to stressors is somehow morally comparable to animals who we know suffer at our hands, is not just inaccurate, it is morally repugnant. I use that term seriously. I find it genuinely revolting to be asked to take seriously the comparison between the suffering of a pig in a factory farm and the chemical response of a sunflower getting their leaf cut. I think that this rhetoric is cynical in the extreme.

This is not an attempt to centre the experiences of plants or to encourage people to value them more. If it was, you’d be encouraging people to eat less meat, since farmed ruminants take in far more calories in crops than they will ever produce in meat, meaning that most meat eating diets require more plants to sustain than a vegan’s does, to say nothing of the vast swathes of formerly forested land now used for grazing. This is less about valuing plants and more about devaluing the pain of non-human animals and put it on the same level as an automatic physiological response in a non-sentient being.

Slitting a pig's throat and picking a strawberry are not morally comparable, and realistically, I think you already know that. I do not believe you are out there in the world behaving as if you believe that every plant you touch, stand on or eat is experiencing pain. I think that this is something you only talk or even think about when you’re arguing with a vegan. To imply that you think that electrocuting a chicken and picking weeds are morally comparable is engaging in mental gymnastics in a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue.

In short, the morally relevant issue is subjective experience, not simply "living matter," or the fact that plants are not "relatable." To pretend that this is why vegans eat plants but not animals, as if there were no other morally relevant difference, is either wildly ignorant of what vegans believe and what the current research actually says, or it is an intentional misrepresentation of both.