If It Was Ever Discovered That Plants Feel Pain...

[THUNDER HANDS]

Do you think vegetarians would be in a moral quandry?

I mean, if vegetables and fruits feel as much pain as animals do, then why should it be any less cruel to kill them and eat them?

And if they do feel pain, what would vegetarians start eating?

Insects?

[Loonman]

1. Do you think that if trees screamed when we cut them....

..we'd be so cavelier about cutting them down?

-- Jack Handey

[Exultant Democracy]

15. If they screamed all the time for no reason.

[smirkymonkey]

16. Too funny!! That is one of

my favorite "Deep Thoughts".

[foo_bar]

2. meat

And if they do feel pain, what would vegetarians start eating?

Dead animal flesh doesn't feel pain, unlike vegetables that scream like lobsters when you steam them. Or maybe jarred applesauce, so you don't hear their leguminous pleas for life.

[kmla]

3. Reminds me of the movie "Notting Hill", when Hugh Grant's character

is set up on a blind date with a 'fruitarian'. They believe that plants are living, feeling creatures, and they only eat fruits and vegetables that are dead, and have fallen to the ground...

Whatever.

[girl gone mad]

4. Speaking as a vegetarian

My dietary choices are based as much on environmental and health care concerns as animal cruelty issues.

As a matter of interest, many plants use tastiness to humans and other animals as a survival tactic. The growth and harvesting of plants is not nearly as disgusting as what goes on in much of the meat industry and we don't face a health crisis from hormones and antibiotics given to plants. Your antiquated analogy doesn't have much merit these days, at least not to me.

[Catholic Sensation]

17. since animal cruelty issues are mas much a part

of you being vegetarian as health and enviromental concenrns, here is some interesting info for you:

Wheat and Soybean harvest result in the killings of millions, if not billions, of animals.

links to more:
http://www.wildlifedamagecontrol.com/animalrights/leastharm.htm
http://eesc.orst.edu/agcomwebfile/news/food/vegan.html

Note: I don't care if animals are accidently killed in the process of getting my meal, because I happen to have the ability to realize this is nature. If cruelty to animals is any reason to be a vegetarian or a vegan, you are a hypocrite because the methods of getting your soybean, wheat, and other vegetables leads to the death of tons of innocent animals.

[TopesJunkie]

18. Can you explain further?

What animals and how, etc... Thanks.

[onebigbadwulf]

5. Honey cheese and milk

dead leaves on the ground and fallen fruit.

[BayCityProgressive]

7. don't flame me but..

animals eat animals. It's nature. I agree some tactics that people use to kill animals for food are disgusting though.

[Robb]

6. Heck, I'm told babies feel pain...

...and I've got no problem with eating them.





Did I just type that? :eyes:

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. "If it was ever discovered that the Earth is flat..."

No brain, no pain. Life and consciousness are entirely different things.

[arissa]

9. What a dumb question

Plants have no nervous system to transmit a pain signal, and no brain to receive the pain signal. Jeez, you can do better than this.

[foo_bar]

10. only vertebrates can feel pain?

Plants don't have a central nervous system, but they react to stimuli all the same. Even protozoa recoil in horror in the face of ethanol. Your conception of pain requires self-awareness of pain, but that's an existential leap even for the Lobster Promotion Council.

[arissa]

12. Please

First, please don't put words in my mouth. You say:

"only vertebrates can feel pain? Plants don't have a central nervous system, but they react to stimuli all the same."

First, I said nervous system, not central nervous system. Plenty of invertebrates have nervous systems. Second, I also included the presence of a brain. I mean, this is basic science - without a nervous system to transmit a pain signal, there's no way for the brain to know there's pain. Without a brain to receive and process the pain signal, there's no possible way to "experience" the pain. It's simply impossible.

Again, basic science tells us that pain is a response aimed at helping a living thing to survive. Something is hot, so the pain makes us move our hand away. Pain and fear are both evolutionary tools aimed at helping us survive. We're fearful, so we run. We're in pain, so we move away from the source of the pain.

But these require locomotion to be effective. It is pointless to feel pain from something if we're unable to move to avoid that pain. It is pointless to feel fear of something if we're unable to escape from that fear.

Plants are grounded, they cannot locomote, and therefore have no evolutionary need for a pain or fear response. Again, this is fantasy you're dealing with here. I learned about nervous systems in grade school, it's amazing the lengths some people will go to try and justify their eating choices.

It's simply impossible, scientifically speaking, to feel pain without a nervous system and a brain.

[foo_bar]

13. pain=ouch?

I mean, this is basic science... Without a brain to receive and process the pain signal, there's no possible way to "experience" the pain. It's simply impossible.

This is basic philosophy. Since your notion of pain is rooted in the "experience" of pain, not the actuality, your circular definition requires a brain to "feel" what every garden variety prokaryote can demonstrate.

Plants are grounded, they cannot locomote, and therefore have no evolutionary need for a pain or fear response.

The plant as an organism has no fight-or-flight response, but its constituent cells do as surely as our unnamed protozoan. Again, if pain needs be centralized to be pain, what you're actually describing is "sensation of pain". I'll admit now that I'm playing devil's advocate to a rather pedantic distinction, but I think it's presumptuous to make the brain the evolutionary predecessor of pain instead of a phylogenetic recepticle to record the pain already (not) felt.

[arissa]

14. Yes, it goes without saying that

pain must be experienced to be pain. If I'm in a car accident, and lose feeling in my legs, and someone stabs my foot, I don't feel pain. Moreover, if I'm braindead but being kept alive physically by machines, I also don't feel pain.

Similarly, plants, with no nervous system (equivalent to my damaged nervous system in my example) and no brain (equivalent to my coma) cannot experience pain.

Chemical reactions to physical damage do not constitute pain. A plant's self-healing chemical reactions are no different than my body clotting to stop a bleed, it's not a pain response, it's just a response. My body will clot a bleed whether or not I experience pain from the cut.

I can't believe this even has to be explained.

[FlaGranny]

20. I remember seeing an experiment on television quite

some time ago. A researcher played music for plants and found that if he played Mozart or some other soothing classical music, the plants actually learned toward it. If he played acid rock, the plants shrunk away and their growth was stunted. And yes, I know, plants can't hear either. But it is something to think about.

[foo_bar]

21. splitting hares

Moreover, if I'm braindead but being kept alive physically by machines, I also don't feel pain.

That's where our semantics depart. You, the vegetative organism, don't perceive pain, but your constituent tissues might. When organ transplants are carried on living patients without a brainstem ("legally dead" except in NY), the muscle fibers still recoil from the scalpel on a microcosmic level.

Chemical reactions to physical damage do not constitute pain.

If clotting is a "chemical reaction", so is cognition. I daresay pain is a chemical reaction to physical damage, but only a brain can point to it. By your definition pain is necessarily centralized, else it's just an aversive reaction. I'm inclined to agree, but our definition of pain is rooted in our experience of it.

I can't believe this even has to be explained.

Is disbelief painful or the absence of a chemical reaction?

P.S. As I said I'm playing advoc tus diabol with you, but I'm occasionally disturbed at the ease with which medical ethicists decide what's living and what's irreversible. I don't think molecules feel pain, and I've boiled many-a-lobster, but a strictly teleological definition of pain might be incomplete.

[Loonman]

11. They have a stress responce

http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/bio/plants/otherplant/b01052d.html

[bloom]

19. snip

"Do plants feel pain?

This is a tricky one, not so much because we don?t know enough about plants, but more because a proper answer might require a rather philosophical discussion of what pain is, whether all animals feel pain in some way, etc. But as a rough-and-ready answer to the question ?what is pain?, why don?t we (for the moment) define it as ?a response to physical stress aimed at reducing that stress?.

I use this definition because although pain means all sorts of things to us, including displeasure and being hurt, it is generally aimed as a ?warning? to the body ? ?this hand is hurting, get it away from the boiling water? is one sort of message pain might be carrying. So at a simple level, pain is aimed at reducing stress.

So ? what?s the answer? Well, recent research indicates that plants do have a stress response, which is used when a leaf is cut, for example. They release a chemical called ethylene (also known as ethene, a simple hydrocarbon: C2H4). Ethylene is released as a gas, all over the surface of the plant, and indeed its release is not only triggered by damage, but also decay. So a rotting plant releases lots of ethylene too.

Why is this like a pain response? Because ethylene release controls plant responses to stress, such as extra cell growth. It?s a signal to the plant to take measures to withstand stress. So this is all quite similar to my definition of pain above."



Seems like some want to think that plant pain should be like human pain - which seems silly - why would it be the same?

[geniph]

22. This might be an issue for vegetarians who don't eat meat for those reason

...but it's not an issue for vegetarians who eschew meat for other reasons.

Not all of us fall into the "it's cute and fuzzy, so I don't eat it" category.

And, as I've said before, making moral judgements of people based on what they do or do not eat is extraordinarily silly and shallow. It's a personal choice, and everyone's reasons are a little different.

[dfong63]

23. even if plants could feel pain,

... vegetarians could argue that they are causing less suffering by consuming the plants directly, than by consuming the flesh of an animal whose raising required the death of many more plants.

[foo_bar]

24. good point

but harvesting hay might be more humane (in a French Revolution sense) than slowly digesting a piece of vine-ripened produce.

http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2003-09-23/index.html

[prolesunited]

25. Yes

I would simply be forced to starve to death. :eyes: