A Garden or a Slaughterhouse?

“Plants have feelings too!” is a joke men make so they can avoid addressing the problem of flesh eating in a substantive way. (Not to be sexist, but I have yet to hear a female omnivore make this joke. I imagine this is a direct result of our culture’s equating meat consumption with virility.)

There is scientific research to indicate that plants react to their environment in complex ways, but a plant is not sentient the way an animal is. A carrot does not have a nervous system; it feels no pain when you tug it up out of the earth. Animals, on the other hand, feel intense pain and fear and grief when they are imprisoned, forcibly impregnated and then separated from their children, and if you were allowed behind closed doors at the nearest factory farm you would not doubt their suffering. Make all the strained jokes you want about a zucchini screaming on the chopping board, but you’re not actually making a point—you’re just obfuscating the real issue.

You might want to consider it this way. A wise man posed the question in a recent Compassion Over Killing Facebook thread:

Would you rather work in a garden or a slaughterhouse?

(This rationale also appears on a Mercy For Animals list of The Top 12 Excuses for Not Going Vegan And Our Responses to Them. That post is pretty entertaining actually—check it out.)