Eating Plants over animals

Yes, I've been ridiculed over eating plants which they claim to be equally sentient like animals. And I cant help myself but just to feel sorry for them, because they make them self believe what they want, instead of having a logical approach. Here Ill give a try to answer all their questions and hope to satisfy their ignorance.


 To the extent that we link the moral status of animals with cognitive characteristics beyond sentience, we continue the humanocentric arrogance that is species-ism. I need to cite 2 important drawbacks of species-ism from Gary L Francione's blog
      1. It ignores that cognitive characteristics beyond sentience are morally irrelevant for determining whether we use a being exclusively as a human resource. We see that in the human context. That is, being “smart” may matter for some purposes, such as whether we give someone a scholarship, but it is completely irrelevant to whether we use someone as a forced organ donor, as a nonconsenting subject in a biomedical experiment.
    2. It sets up a standard that animals, however much they are “like us,” can never win. For example, we have known for a long time that nonhuman great apes are very much like humans in all sorts of ways but we continue to exploit them. However much animals are “like us,” they are never enough “like us” to translate into an obligation on our parts to stop exploiting them .


The argument of plants compared to be equally sentient as animals is a way to dismiss the idea of eating animals without having to seriously consider the moral grounds.Forgets Morals first, why do we stand for animals and not for plants, the simple reason is pain. Pain is over all morals for me.The sole biological purpose of pain is to ensure that a living organism gets away from or avoids potentially life-threatening dangers. All the animals want to escape their death, I've seen sacrificial or animals waiting in the slaughter house lines to run away from the screams coming from inside. Since plants are unable to escape life-threatening situations, there is no reason to imagine that plants would have evolved a sense of pain. To explore the consciousness of plants as well as fungi and single-celled organisms, there is no better place to begin than Jeremy Narby’s book INTELLIGENCE IN NATURE. But if one truly believes that killing a carrot is as bad as killing an animal, then the moral imperative is to refrain from eating either instead of eating both.

 A final issue: Does a focus on sentience itself establish a hierarchy of the sentient over the non-sentient? No, because sentience is a necessary as well as sufficient characteristic for a being to have interests (preferences, desires, or wants) in the first place. A rock is not sentient; it does not have any sort of mind that prefers, desires, or wants anything. A plant is alive but has no sort of mind that prefers, desires, or wants anything. It would be justifiable to kill off something that has no interest in living, such as a plant, but since we believe that animals do have an interest in living it would be speciesist to kill off a puppy simply because it is not human. We know that society believes animals have an interest in living sometimes because there is outcry when baby seals are clubbed or when elephants are poached for their ivory. Yet at other times we are happy to eat animal flesh and wear leather.

 Finally, I would just like to say that this is just an introductory blog written by me. Later I will like to expand on basic ideas and questions regarding species-ism, plants sentience and moral basis. Please posts questions if you have any and I will try to answer them in my next blog.

Those who eat the meat of other [living beings] in order to satisfy their own flesh, they are definitely murderers [themselves], since without a consumer [there can be] no killer. — Acharya Hemacandra (12th c. Jain ascetic/scholar)