“Know” is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it’s not like you’re killing an animal.
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It’s always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by area, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by mass. The idea that those organisms don’t “think” in some way is laughable.
“In some way” is doing A LOT of heavy lifting there. … although in the general sense, agreed.
Especially given how many outright wrong or otherwise assinine conclusions some “thinking” animals come to… Perhaps communicative consciousness is overrated on the intelligence scale.
It always seems lime some excuse in a counter response by vеgаns
The number of times I’ve responded to them telling them that plants probably process pain in a different way to us has always been shot down by them
Tell them that brains extremely simplified are just on and off responses to certain stimuli / information just like plants have specific reponsonses to stimuli and computers having 1’s and 0’s that respond to information
A mycelium network could be counted as a brain
If you actually believe harming plants causes them pain and that that is bad, you should be vegan. Animal agriculture harms far, far more plants than any plant agriculture ever could.
But then you’re still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn’t that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
I really don’t know if plants can cause pain and I think the environmental arguments for not eating meat are far more compelling than the ethical ones, but regardless, I think this is a poor argument for veganism.
But then you’re still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn’t that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
If you insist on animal abuse then you should do it through hunting rather than factory farming precisely because of the diminished amount of suffering caused. But it’s still more suffering than would be caused by just eating plants so I’m not sure I understand your point
I’m talking about an argument for veganism though. If you are saying that it’s acceptable for people to eat hunted meat, you’re not saying they should be vegans. And you’re encouraging a massive increase in hunting.
You should read the book “entangled life” if you haven’t already. It’s fascinating.
I’ll trade you. I’ll read ur book if you check out the ender quintet, or at least speaker of the dead. The hierarchy of foreignness is a concept that has REALLY stuck with me. Also pequininos are bros.
because humans invent things from scratch that nature has already created and optimzed, it’s why we’re seeing a lot of optimizations on current tech that comes from nature itself.
It’s a really weird problem to have.
Go find that video of a slime mold optimizing Japan’s rail system by finding oats in a maze
isn’t this similar to or equivalent in concept to letting water pathfind through a maze for example?
No. The slime mold doesn’t just solve the maze. It figures out the optimal path and grows only where it needs to reach the goal. It’s a fascinating thing to watch in time-lapse. The “water in a maze” idea is that if it fills every passage, the only drain would be the exit.
obviously, but the flow path of the water is going to be a direct path to the end of the maze also. You just have to wait for it to fill up first lol.
Huh, neat.
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It’s truly shameful that disclaimers like these feel necessary in this age of shitting on everyone else online. Lemmy users suck too.
Yeah, but on the other hand I’m old enough to know that when I get excited about something I can talk about it in a way that “clobbers” so I like to disclaimer myself when I know I’m exhibiting that kind of behavior.
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don’t know or care of their friends start dying.
I’d argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.
This is why I don’t eat books
The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.
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I don’t care what a plant thinks of me; it won’t change the dynamic that I’m motivated and it’s prey.
My point is that plants “think” but do so differently than meat bags. Plant cognition is more like a series of low level chemical reactions that look like thinking, but so does brain chemical squirts if we look close enough. So plants may actually be thinking using mechanisms which don’t rely on complex brain architecture because it has another method of processing that thought. Probably across the whole structure but the process is really inefficient so it takes a long time to finish compute.
Like if a super computer made the judgement of a calculator - they are both crunching numbers but there is an order of magnitude difference in how fast the answer is found. Maybe a plant has low bus speeds and crappy compute limited to simple threaded operations.
We can’t say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
Isn’t that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
Some misguided monsters, yes.
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you’re just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
No, vegans aren’t eating fish or seafood.
Some of them eat oysters, or so I’m told. They lack a brain and centralised nervous system.
One of my exes is very strictly vegetarian and will eat oysters. Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves or the environment, effectively they’re a water pump made out of meat, and they’re one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even. It’s definitely a controversial opinion though
When talking about the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves (the oysters) how is that actually measured and what do they look for
How are we sure they are not actually self aware through some other unknown mechanism
I am not a biologist but my understanding is that largely has to do with a lack of central nervous system. It would be like asking if a heart is aware of itself. It can autonomously react to things like low oxygen but that isn’t because those signals go anywhere that makes a decision it’s more like a chemical/biological Rube Goldberg machine. If you really want to get down to it though I don’t think we can know for certain just make educated guesses, and imo oysters are even less likely to have any form of consciousness than a lot of plants or mushrooms
Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves
Fish too btw, as far as we know. Lizard brain is an evolution of fish brain, they are basically biological automata.
Makes one think, live getting on land was it getting into hard mode.
one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though, the ones with cages, because of their poop/piss(?). But sure, because hundreds in one place.
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though
Yeah no monoculture farm is without it’s damage, for sure, but oysters are real low on the list. They are filter feeders so don’t need any additional food source or fertilizer you just seed them somewhere and pull them out as needed. A single one filters something like fifty gallons of water a day, capture carbon for their shells, and they’re incredible at pulling heavy metals out of the water but that’s not something they’re utilized for at scale afaik because then humans wouldn’t want to eat those ones
Your fish science is wildly outdated.
Right, looks like some fish species can feel pain.
Peak ambiguity.
If it helps give context, various … factions? (I’m not sure the best word here) consider honey OK and others do not. You can research that more if you want to get an idea of what some vegans might think.
Vegans don’t really have factions. Every single one is an individual with their own values.
Yeah, I couldn’t think of a better word at the moment. “schools of thought” is probably a better one for grouping overall themes that exist within the vegan movement.
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don’t have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can’t kill them directly before boiling them.
Lemmyworld admins be like
Let’s assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That’s an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
This logic doesn’t make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize it.
Or maybe there’s happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don’t kill ourselves this decade or the next.
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these “facts of life”.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
I’m no vegan but that’s a common vegan talking point
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don’t think is convincing?
Well, I guess I’m just not sure why you’re trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you’re just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you’re talking about at best, and realistically, you don’t even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
And you are welcome to take the advice I didn’t give to you in the first place and throw it in the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
how much experience do you have with people convincing you of things?
no arguments there
You do not know the best advice for advocacy for a group without being part of it.
You say you’re supportive of vegans but then go out of your way to say the “vegan cheese is gross”
I know it may be hard to believe, but my taste in food is different from yours. I would never cook with vegan cheese. There are plenty of vegan recipes out there which don’t require processed fake food.
Taste is not a valid argument to harm bovines and there are many different types of vegan cheeses, you cannot generalize.
There’s that antivegan language again “fake food”
Processed fake cheese is fake food.
You don’t get it. Don’t use real cheese or fake cheese. Cook healthy things, not that processed shit. Why do you have to have some form of cheese?
You’re being culturally insensitive and uncivil. The processed plant-based food problem is overblown and fearmongered in the mainstream media in order to protect the interests of animal agriculture. Vegans want the taste of cheese without the cruelty involved.
Easter eggs don’t have eggs in them so why call them that.
and it’s an interesting one too, if you like production stats at least.
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include “bAc0Nnnnnn!” and “I’m gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless”.
Amazing strawman at the end there.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of “God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan” like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
It really isn’t. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with “you can’t take away my gas stove, i’m just going to burn gas lamps in my home now” and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
true, cows are my favorite food.
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait… Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of boobs.
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i thought it was for us to legislate female top wear?
hmm
You think they don’t? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn’t it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I’m not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that’s what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency…
BUT manure doesn’t just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can’t be good for forests though. I guess I’m just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and “composts” can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don’t just have to use animal shit. Although it’s a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
We humans shit as well
Diseases spread via human feces which why we tend to not use it. We could sanitize it by processing it, but then it won’t carry the benefit of beneficial bacteria cultures so it’s not as good as animal supplied manures.
Carnivores eat animals that eat a lot more plants than humans could ever eat.
That’s why I only eat baby animals. They only drink milk, which hurts no one.
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Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
But it tastes better
I’m afraid I’m going to need a better argument than “I support killing animals because it makes me feel good.”
Then raise a cow and kill it.
Can’t, don’t really have the space for it, but you want to see my chickens and my ducks? Heck, you can have a picture of my dog, but I ain’t eating that.
but I ain’t eating that
Well, now I’m just disappointed that that’s just a vegan anti meat page.
I was more disappointed by the inconsistency of their claims.
On the front page, they said that, they gave their livestock the highest quality feed and kept them happy in an open environment.
Upon reading further, they changed their tone to keeping them in small cages, followed with stuff like, “don’t worry, you won’t taste it”.They, as a company, lost credibility. Definitely not buying from them.
Yeah, I was looking for recipes as well
So the choice is meat or division of labor?
I don’t have the space for it, though I’d really like to have a little farm of my own.
I’m sure there’s poison that tastes good. Go eat that, Mr. Bigot.
The cow meat is already there, in the store. Individual choices do not affect the climate. It is disrespectful to not consume it.
demand and supply are a thing
There’s a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
Those poor cats. Vegans shouldn’t be allowed to own meat.
Dogs taste better anyways. Can’t beat a good Elwood’s steak!
That website is confusing, it doesn’t let you order any dog meat. It also seems to assume I would have a problem with the product? Is that a strategy to make me want it more?
Yeah that’s an obvious troll response you vеgаn’s use
People are well aware of it
Doing this sort of “eating a cow is no more ethical than eating a dog” thing isn’t necessarily untrue (although ethics are, of course, a subjective thing) but it does not really convince people not to eat meat. If you are going to argue from an ethics of killing and eating an animal angle, talk about why it is cruel to kill and eat animals that most people who eat meat are used to eating.
Different people react to different things. It takes many approaches to reach multiple types of humans.
I personally reacted after months of being shown hypocrisy, with the tipping point being when I said there’s no problem with eggs and dairy before I was shown what the egg and dairy industries do.
Part of that process was really realizing, not just knowing but consciously thinking about and considering the fact that humans are also meat. I am meat. The cats I loved were meat. My human family is meat. It’s not okay to eat them in a sandwich. Why is it okay to eat strangers in a sandwich?
No one approach will work on every human, and many people take a lot of different approaches over time to really understand.
I always fall back on the concept of graphing how delicious the animal is vs how much of an asshole it is. Ducks? Absolutely delicious and raging assholes; they are the perfect meal. Dogs? Too sweet to ever try and on the negative side of the asshole graph. Cats? Rather asshole but not sure how they taste…
Maybe you’re joking but I have seen people say this seriously so I’ll respond seriously. Determining which conscious beings to inflict pain and suffering onto based on characteristics they were born with through no choice of their own is pretty shitty.
I’m all for the most humane and ethical means of getting meat and the day I can get a steak that didn’t require a cow to die but is indistinguishable from the real thing I will absolutely switch over, but until then I’m going to enjoy delicious, delicious duck and not feel bad about. Wouldn’t eat a dog even in an apocalypse though.
Great idea, let’s stop re-homing rescue animals shall we?
“Plants rights activists” out in full force in this thread lol
Imo, the person in red looks much healthier.
Low effort
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Lower effort.
^^ Lowest Effort.
That’s your highest effort one yet.
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Guys this comment thread is causing me, an animal, stress.
Stahp
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There’s no way this won’t restart the same argument with someone, huh? Top-tier shitpost, well done.
Thanks, I saw it come across my FB feed and knew what had to be done.
That’s why I only eat fungi. It’ll be reciprocal eventually.
Fun fact, humans share more DNA with fungi than they do with plants. We share nearly 50% of our DNA with fungi.
Plus mushrooms are the sex organs of the mycelium organism. Just an extra fun fact for free there.
So, OP eats mushroom dick. Got it.
There are theories that hypothesize that mycelium came to earth via asteroids from space.
So it may be more apt to say that OP eats space dick instead.
It’s my understanding that fungi came around rather late in the game. Long after animals and plants both.
The earliest fungi evolved approximately 1.5 billion years ago, while green algae, the earliest plant, only evolved ~1 billion years ago. Animalia is significantly newer.
Similarly, I plan on double crossing the mafia so Thin Lips Johnny can chop me up and feed me to the pigs. Circle of life.
Yo fuck that propagandist piece of shit Joe Rogan. Keep him off of my feed.
I’m constantly dismayed to find that brain damaged ape, topping the podcast charts weekly. He’s such a disease
I mean if you stretch the definition enough even cells know they are being eaten. they usually respond by “shit this cant be good, I better press this big red button”
What will Staples do?
dont get the reference
Is that the browning that goes on on the outside when baking some meat?
There was a Hungarian cult that convinced others that people can survive by eating light. There were some deaths and was quickly shut down, but they exist forever in anorexia-related jokes.
I think you’re talking about Breatherism? There’ve been a couple of those cults all over Europe. It’s not particularly popular, luckily, but they often make it to the newspapers, because someone usually dies.
It originates from Hinduism though. There’s a another Indian religion called Jainism. These are the monks you see brushing away the beetles before their feet, to not step on them. It’s very much about nature and spiritualism and being good. Fasting is a key concept of this religion and the most extreme cases will choose to fast until death to cleanse the world. This is all very spiritual though and takes years of preparation.
Ew, Joe Rogan.
