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Comment by dayglo | Hacker News Reader

If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?

You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.

If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.

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It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).

Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:

Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:

https://news.wisc.edu/blazes-of-light-reveal-how-plants-sign...

Plants responding to sounds of herbivore (dare we say “predator”) insects:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6

Even plant “vision” is becoming more plausible:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggies-with-visi...

You can find a lot more material in this vein. My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.

That's interesting, thanks for the links.

if I starve you for a week, what would you do then?

ethics are always the privilege of the well to do

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