By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.
someone smarter than me should get to inventing a device that listens to plant clicks and tells you when it needs water
Might be a good use-case to have your home irrigation system be triggered by plant clicks instead of a schedule.
It could be. Although we don’t know how much those sounds indicate distress, and perhaps watering should happen much sooner.
Imagine if aliens abduct you and give you food only when your stomach makes the kind of noise it makes after three days without eating anything, because “that’s all they can detect.”
Well hence they will work out when the plant (or human in your example) is really starving.
Vegans: … uh… now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you’d be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
Wouldn’t you need to decimate the population of cows, pigs, and chickens in order to reduce their environmental impact? This argument always invokes an image of Thanos wiping out half the universe in order to ‘save’ it, but the people making this argument never seem to be receptive to acknowledging this point and just hand wave this step away.
Which would you prefer? A thousand people living freely or a hundred thousand people living in cages too small to stand up in?
Get outta here with pretending that big number = better. Those animals are raised in horrifying conditions explictly to be slaughtered. They wouldn’t exist in the first place except for the cruelty and greed of the meat industry. We routinely acknowledge that there are ‘fates worse than death’ for people, but when it comes to animals people seem to forget that. With the ending of the meat industry, fewer animals would exist, but they would be much better cared for.
The population of livestock is artificially high because of meat industries. Additionally, all animals in a meat producing farm will be killed already. That’s the entire purpose. Simply slowing the reproductive rate of the industry would reduce the populations on a fairly short timeline. I’m a meat eater myself, but using the killing of animals as an argument AGAINST slowing meat production is not very logical.
Vegans: we’ll have only a little vegetable cruelty, as a treat.
Whatever keeps the high horse fed.
You’re going to have to unpack this a bit more for me.
Edit: Ohhhh, you’re another one of those plant rights activists. Buddy, I eat plants for breakfast. You know what? Now I’m going to eat twice as many plants, just because it upsets you.
Unless you count grass and non-human consumables and non-potable water…sure…until then that’s bullshit.
How is that bullshit? I am not vegan, but that’s just a scientific consensus and a major reason why plant diet is way lower carbon than a meat diet. If you need to grow plant food for your animal food, eventually you have to grow way more plant food.
Most animals raised for meat consumption are fed with crops, notably soy, not wild grass.
Thinking animals raised for meat only consume resources (land (first cause of biodiversity loss), plants, water, energy) that would not be useful to humans anyway is undoubtedly wrong.
Researchers Poore and Nemecek are a great source of meta-analysis information about those subjects. Check this summary here for example: http://environmath.org/2018/06/17/paper-of-the-day-poore-nemecek-2018-reducing-foods-environmental-impacts/
Let me know if I misunderstood your point.
What figures are you basing your ignorance off of? The majority of the plants humans grow through crop-based agriculture are fed to non-human animals. Animal ag is one of the largest consumers of fresh (ie “potable”) water. There are ten animals living in human possession for every human on Earth. Without intensive plant agriculture, we could not possibly feed them all. Grass and run-off is not what is producing your food.
And since we are specifically discussing the hypothetical suffering of plants, why wouldn’t you count grass? You’re triggered.
Are you saying grass aren’t plants? Why would it matter if the plant is consumable by humans if vegans are trying to minimize suffering?
I challenge you to make an appetizing meal out of the plants (and specific cultivars!) used as animal feed.
Not a vegan: remember we raise a lot of these plants just as feed. If the reason to feed disappeared, so would the vast quantity of “not tasty” plants.
If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you’re the potato.
Humans have to eat and with the exception of a few minerals like salt, everything edible to humans is alive on some level. Vegansisn is making an ethical choice about reducing what causes the most pain fear and suffering in another. If I were to develop cancer, a tape worm or a virus should I also allow those living things to thrive as well or does “Uh, now what?” also apply to antibiotics?
If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you’re the potato.
Eat people because they’re potatoes, got it!
Or wait, it’s “than”? Hmm…no, I can’t think of how to turn it into a joke with a punchline of “than” being there instead of “then”, lol
How about I just get to eat meat because I consider it far more humane to be more efficient about proteins? And eggs and cheeses are more efficient with all sorts of aminos.
As much as I respect vegans I also don’t agree with their approach. I am of the opinion (as is most biologists) that we are omnivores.
(as is most biologists) that we are omnivores.
No vegans dispute this. In fact that is a large reason we point that meat is not a necessity to a healthy diet like many claim.
But fundamentally I’m not here to talk about veganism. You are entitled to your own beliefs, I only wanted to provide a complete answer to the “hypocritical vegans” comment that appears in every thread paints feeling pain. While I personally think deciding that things are most “humane” when they are “efficient” for you regardless of the effect it has on others is selfish and motivated reasoning, thus unethical. But this thread nor community is a place to discuss ethics, I clearly illuminated why equating plant rights and animal rights is silly, so frankly I would just like to end the discussion there. Thanks.
What? The entire point of veganism is that it is an entire order of magnitude more efficient than eating meat. Turns out all the land we use to feed animals we can just grow soybeans on instead. Speaking of which, you want amino acids? Wanna take a guess what has all the amino acids you need? That’s right, tofu! It’s widely recognized as the healthiest source of protein possible. That sets it apart from red or processed meat, which actively gives you heart disease and cancer.
Look, I’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. If you want to eat meat despite the facts indicating you shouldn’t, that’s fine. Same as you can decide to smoke cigarettes and drive a Hummer. Just be aware that it’s worse for both you and the entire planet.
How about I just get to eat meat because I consider it far more humane to be more efficient about proteins?
What does this have to do with anything? This is bringing efficiency to an ethics fight.
In the same way that cultists give human sacrifices to Cthulhu specifically to eat.
I’m pretty sure the fruits are screaming too.
The whole deal is that we get to eat the fruit, and in return we provide the seeds within with a nice nitrogen-rich deposition nice and far from the parent plant.
It’s not a death cult, it’s a sex cult. The fruits might be screaming, but not in pain
What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.
Well, not in any way that we can relate to anyway. But that was the same with animals much earlier.
Maybe hundreds of years from now we can synthesize nutrients without involving any living cells. At that point, it could be seen as unethical to enslave, murder and eat billions of microbial cells. For the time being, our life still depends on other living things, so better get comfortable with having mixed feelings about survival.
Technically we can, it’s just so expensive as to be completely out of the question.
Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies.
Another “science” community with clickbaity bullshit.
Mowing my lawn must be a fucking nightmare for everything involved. ☹️
Imagine if instead of a podcast or audiobook or symphonic power metal you had to listen to the screams of your lawn as you mowed its life short
You know why freshly mown grass smells so nice?
The smell is the grass’s defense against grazing animals, as it attracts predators.
It smells nice cause it tells your predator brain there are prey animals you can eat nearby.
So the grass is literally snitching on the animals that are eating it, announcing their presence to their predators.
Evolution is fascinating that way.
Hasn’t this study been done before? Feel like I’ve heard of grass “distress signals” from years back
Yes, remember that one as well, but this is a literal sound, not only a “plants communicate stress in some way” (if I remember the previous research correctly).
