Does meat make you stupid?
04 February 2005

“Ok, so how do we know that plants can’t feel pain?”

They have no pain receptiors. No central nervous system.

“Ok, but what if we discover that plants can feel pain in 10 years? Will you stop eating them?”

No. I need to eat something to live, and in any case, if they do find that plants feel pain—which I doubt—it seems completely unlikely to me that they’ll ever discover that, say, broccoli is sentient. In that case, I’ll keep eating plants anyway.

“Right, but if plants can feel pain and animals can feel pain, why not just eat animals?”

Well, even if we do accept that in some crazy future plants can be found to feel pain, I’m only committing one murder, while you’re committing two everytime you eat meat.

“Why so?”

Well, think about it: most animals that are killed for meat eat plants. If plants are sentient, or feel pain, or whatever and the animal that you’re consuming eats them, and then you kill the animal and eat it, that’s two deaths.

“Yeah, but…”

Look, are you really going to sit here and tell me that you’re concerned with plant rights, or are you just looking for a convoluted excuse to keep eating whatever the hell you want?

No answer.

For what it is worth, I try to be patient with this kind of thing. We all didn’t start out as vegetarians, you know. It can take a very long time to come to consciousness about suffering and other beings. I’m cool with that (though I wish it’d happen faster).

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under:
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