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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Let's say that plants do have some kind of sentience, which is probably very limited due to the evidence we do have. Animals still have more advanced sentience that is closer to our own so it would still be the lesser evil to eat plants. Like why would you eat other people or chimps when there are other options available?
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to say that plants suffer the same way as animals. I know you're not saying this, but you do hear stuff like this based on this premise.
Check out the Joe Rogan episode with Paul Stamets on how fungi allow trees in a forest to exchange nutrients. Dunno if that is classed as "communication" but it still blew my mind.
It was the first Rogan episode I saw and the only good one as it turned out.
Measuring levels of sentience in the context of what's OK to do to it is an extremely dangerous road to be taking that always ends in eugenics.
Uh, what?
First you say it's OK to be cruel to one life form because it's less intelligent, it's not long before that extends to disabled people. It might sound like hyperbole, but never underestimate the internet's capacity to steer the ship towards nazi germany when given the chance.
Who said anything about intelligence?
That has nothing to do with being disabled, as people with disabilities still sense the world
You can't eat anything in the modern world without killing animals. A combine harvester harvests wheat and mice. A hundred meat eaters are responsible for a single cow death, and the cow lived on marginal land, drinking from streams - you couldn't grow other food on the land (sure some are grown on perfect fertile land, they don't need to be)
Not saying I'm a meat eater, I don't care about mice, but there's blood on all our hands
Statistically, that cow had a short and miserable life in a factory farm before being killed at a small fraction of their potential lifespan. They were fed a grain-based diet that caused far more mice deaths than it would have to use the land to grow crops to feed humans directly.
Even in the situation you've presented, which again is an exceedingly small percentage (<10% globally, <1% in the US), land is being used which could be rewilded to promote biodiversity. The cow in question is still contributing to GHG emissions and will again be killed around 16 months of age.
A quick google gave me
So maybe you should revisit the idea of 'marginal land' that 'couldn't grow other food'
Of course, but livestock require even more agriculture to maintain than the same caloric/protein intake of plant based. So if the choice is 50 animals or 100 animals then the choice is easy.