Preface
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This briefing provides several reasons why objections to veganism based on plant sentience or plant pain are unfounded.
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| Text: | |
| Key Points | 6 |
| Counterclaims | 2 |
| Advocacy Notes | 3 |
| Footnotes | 17 |
| Media: | |
| Companion Videos | 0 |
| Memes and Infographics | 0 |
| Presentation Slides | 0 |
| Flash Cards | 26 |
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Summary
A concise summary of the briefing (see below for citations).
In short, the plant-sentience objection to veganism is flawed because plants lack the capacity to suffer or feel emotions, unlike animals, and eating animals causes more plant deaths than directly consuming plants due to agricultural inefficiency. While plant sentience is often sensationalized, it does not compare ethically or scientifically to the well-established sentience of animals.
The objection to veganism framed around plant sentience is generally not about genuine concern for plants but seeks to highlight a perceived inconsistency in ethical eating.
The plant-sentience objection to veganism claims that if both plants and animals are sentient, then avoiding animal consumption for ethical reasons should also apply to plants. However, a closer examination shows that these claims lack substance, as plant “sentience” is not comparable to animal sentience.
Eating animals results in the death of more plants than directly consuming plants because of the inefficiency in converting plant calories into animal calories.
Plants do not suffer or feel pain, as they lack a brain and pain receptors. They also do not experience emotions, have self-awareness, or hold desires like animals do, making them fundamentally different in ethically significant ways.
On a visceral level, the difference between harming a plant and an animal is clear—cutting grass does not evoke the same emotional response as harming an animal.
Some plants rely on being eaten to spread their seeds and ensure species survival.
While the topic of plant sentience is intriguing, it is often sensationalized and does not hold up under scrutiny when compared to the well-documented sentience of animals.
Context
Places this topic in its larger context.
This objection to animal rights and veganism is usually not from a concern for the well-being of plants but to illuminate a perceived inconsistency. If both plants and animals are sentient and have feelings, and if we abstain from eating animals for ethical reasons, then we must also abstain from eating plants.
Claims of plant sentience and intelligence make for provocative titles and seductive clickbait, but a closer consideration of the evidence renders these claims vacuous.
Key Points
This section provides talking points.
Eating animals kills more plants than eating plants.
Even if we assume that plants are sentient and can feel pain, eating plants directly would still cause less harm than eating animals. This is because raising animals for food is extremely inefficient: animals require large amounts of plant calories to produce a relatively small amount of edible animal calories.
- Due to the energy lost in metabolism and the need to grow non-edible parts (like bones, feathers, and skin),1 it takes on average 24 calories of plant feed to produce one calorie of food from animals (World Resources Institute, “Creating a Sustainable Food Future.”)2
- Over 75% of the world’s grains and soy used for food are fed to animals (United Nations and Our World in Data.)34
Plants differ from animals in ethically significant ways.
Plants don’t suffer or feel pain. Because plants lack a brain and pain receptors, they cannot feel pain. Plants may sense they are being eaten through mechanoreceptors, but they don’t care.5
Plants cannot experience emotions. Emotions are processed in the hippocampus and amygdala regions of the brain—neither of which are present in plants.6
Plants have no self-awareness or sense of the future. Thinking requires a brain, and without thought, there can be no self-awareness or sense of the future.
Plants do not have desires, preferences, or interests. These traits require thinking, and thinking requires a brain.
There is no reason plants would experience pain.
Because pain is a response to avoid tissue damage by withdrawing or fleeing, and since plants have limited ability to withdraw or flee, there is no reason they would have evolved to feel pain.7
Some plants depend on being eaten for the survival of their species.
Some plants depend on being eaten to enhance the chances that their species will survive. The indigestible seeds of the plants will be spread over a wide geographical area as the plants are eaten by animals and then deposited in the animals’ excrement.8
Visceral reactions differ with plants and animals.
At a less cerebral and more visceral level, I think we all sense the difference between pulling up a dandelion and slitting the throat of a chicken. Watching someone mow the lawn doesn’t evoke the same reaction as watching someone kick a dog. This visceral difference in reactions to harming plants versus animals shows we intuitively recognize animals’, not plants’, capacity to suffer.
Plants can act intelligently without being sentient.
Plants exhibit intelligence through complex behaviors like responding to stimuli, communicating chemically, and optimizing resource use. However, these are biochemical pathways, not neural pathways. Plants lack a brain and the capacity for subjective experiences, which are essential for sentience.9
Counterclaims
Responses to some yes but retorts.
Claim: You can’t prove that plants are not sentient, don’t feel pain, and don’t suffer.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. If one says that plants are sentient, for example, it’s up to them to prove that claim. Similarly, if I say unicorns are real then the burden of proof is on me to offer evidence that they are real, not on you to prove they are not.
Depending on how it’s pitched, this is known as the burden of proof fallacy10 or the argument from ignorance fallacy.11
- Burden of Proof Fallacy Example:
- “Plants are sentient, and if you disagree, you need to prove they aren’t.”
- This statement attempts to shift the burden of proof to others to disprove the claim instead of providing evidence to support the assertion that plants are sentient.
- Argument from Ignorance Fallacy Example:
- “No one has proven that plants aren’t sentient, so they must be.”
- Here, the claim is assumed to be true simply because there is no evidence proving it false, relying on a lack of disproof as evidence for the claim.
Related Quote: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”(Christopher Hitchens).12
Claim: There are numerous articles showing that plants are sentient, feel pain, and suffer.
There are numerous articles that make claims of plant sentience. Because plant sentience is a fascinating topic with widespread interest and curiosity, it lends itself to clickbait, sensationalism, and misrepresentation of findings.
A 2021 study published in Protoplasma, “Debunking a myth, plant consciousness” (mentioned in “Further Study” below), clarifies misconceptions and highlights the significant differences between animal and plant responses, reinforcing that plants do not have the capacity for consciousness in the way animals do. The main points are worth noting here:13
- “[P]lants have not been shown to perform the proactive, anticipatory behaviors associated with consciousness, but only to sense and follow stimulus trails reactively.”
- “[E]lectrophysiological signaling in plants serves immediate physiological functions rather than integrative-information processing as in nervous systems of animals, giving no indication of plant consciousness.
- “[T]he controversial claim of classical Pavlovian learning in plants, even if correct, is irrelevant because this type of learning does not require consciousness.”
Supplementary Info
Additional information that may prove useful.
Leonardo da Vinci Weighs In
It’s anecdotally interesting that Leonardo da Vinci realized hundreds of years ago that plants have no reason to feel pain. In one of his notebooks, he said:
- “Though nature has given sensibility to pain to such living organisms as have the power of movement,—in order thereby to preserve the members which in this movement are liable to diminish and be destroyed,—the living organisms which have no power of movement do not have to encounter opposing objects, and plants consequently do not need to have a sensibility to pain, and so it comes about that if you break them they do not feel anguish in their members as do the animals.”14
Further Study
Sources providing a deeper understanding of the topic or related topics.
Other Resources
The 2021 study published in Protoplasma, “Debunking a myth: plant consciousness” (mentioned in “Counterclaims” above) critiques existing claims and misconceptions about plant consciousness and debunks the idea that plants possess sentience or conscious experience.15
This article by Sentient Media goes into more detail than this briefing in explaining that while plants can react to their environment through chemical and electrical responses, these reactions are fundamentally different from pain.16
“From Animal to Plant Sentience: Is There Credible Evidence?” by Heather Browning and Jonathan Birch (2023) examines the behavioral capacities of plants and assesses whether they are credible indicators of sentience. The authors conclude that, based on standards of evidence used in animal sentience research, the current behavioral evidence is insufficient to attribute sentience to plants.17
Advocacy Resources
Information to help with outreach and advocacy.
Additional media and advocacy resources are on the way, though not every briefing will feature every type of media.
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Advocacy Notes
Tips for Advocacy and Outreach
When addressing an objection, try to respond briefly and steer the conversation back to the animals. These briefings provide detailed, cited responses, which you can share by inviting others to visit this website. This allows you concentrate on the animals without getting bogged down in all the specifics of an objection during the discussion.
Question to Ask
- Ask your interlocutor how they would personally react to seeing someone pull a weed versus seeing someone slit the throat of a pig.
- It can be effective to ask your interlocutor by what mechanism a plant can feel pain given they lack a brain and pain receptors.
Perhaps the most succinct response, when told that plants have intelligence, is to say “Yes, but those are biochemical pathways, not neural pathways—there’s a big difference.”
We have placed the key point “eating animals kills more plants than eating plants” first because it can effectively nullify any further arguments about plant sentience invalidating veganism.
Footnotes
Our sources, with links back to where they’re used.
- James Rowe and John Nolan, Energy Requirements of Livestock. The Theory and Practice of Animal Nutrition, Applied Animal Nutrition Journal 2009 ↩︎
- The 24 to 1 figure was calculated from the table on page 37, figure 2, by averaging the ratios of calories in to calories out among the different animal products. For example, pigs consume 10 calories to get one calorie of pork out (100/10). If you average beef (100), milk (14), shrimp (14), pork (10), chicken (9), fin fish (8), and egg (13), you get 24. If sheep and buffalo milk were included, the average would be even more concerning.. “Creating a Sustainable Food Future.” World Resources Institute, 2013-2014 ↩︎
- In the referenced report, under Markets at a Glance—Course Grains, the latest data shows 224.7 units of coarse grains were used for human food (food) and 864.3 units were used for animal food (feed). Therefore, a total of 1089 units in total were used for food, but 864.3 of those were fed to animals. This is over 79% of the total. Food Outlook. United Nations FAO. November 2022 ↩︎
- Soy, Our World in Data. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. 2020 ↩︎
- We Asked a Biologist If Plants Can Feel Pain.” Vice. Accessed July 26, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xd74nd/we-asked-a-botanist-how-sure-science-is-that-plants-cant-feel-pain-302 ↩︎
- Phelps EA. Human emotion and memory: interactions of the amygdala and hippocampal complex. Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2004 Apr;14(2):198-202. PMID: 15082325. ↩︎
- Draguhn, A., Mallatt, J.M. & Robinson, D.G. Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 239–248 (2021). ↩︎
- Nevo O, Filla C, Valenta K, Schupp EW. What drives seed dispersal effectiveness? Ecol Evol. 2023 Aug 31;13(9):e10459. Accessed Nov 15, 2024. ↩︎
- Draguhn, A., Mallatt, J.M. & Robinson, D.G. Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 239–248 (2021). ↩︎
- Hansen, Hans. “Fallacies (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 29 May 2015. Access 16 Nov 2024. ↩︎
- “Argument from Ignorance.” Lucid Philosophy. ↩︎
- Clark, Roy Peter. “A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens: How to Write like a Wise Guy – Poynter.” Poynter, 16 Dec. 2011. Accessed 16 Nov. 2024. ↩︎
- Mallatt, Jon, et al. “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness.” Protoplasma, vol. 258, no. 3, 1 May 2021, pp. 459–476, Accessed 16 Nov. 2024. ↩︎
- da Vinci, Leonardo. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Note-Books: Arranged and Rendered into English with Introductions. Empire State Book Company, 1923, 120 ↩︎
- Mallatt, Jon, et al. “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness.” Protoplasma, vol. 258, no. 3, 1 May 2021, pp. 459–476, Accessed 16 Nov. 2020. ↩︎
- Kim, Hemi. “Do Plants Feel Pain? How Do We Know That They Don’t?” Sentient Media, 17 Aug. 2022. ↩︎
- “From Animal to Plant Sentience: Is There Credible Evidence?” by Heather Browning and Jonathan Birch (2023) DOI
10.51291/2377-7478.1784 ↩︎
