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Comment by hellow0rldz | Hacker News Reader

But plants also suffer, right?

Also, if individual numbers count we might as well raise buffalo.

All animals we eat eat plants. If you want to reduce "plant suffering", then we can optimize our diets to require less plants. And the diet that requires less plants is... a plant based diet. Big animals are a very inefficient way at creating nutrition.

Ooh, so it's not only about killing but overall suffering. Because they do kill the bugs but animals don't generally eat the whole plant, only part of it. The plant still survives.

> But plants also suffer, right?

As far as we know they neither feel pain nor are they sentinent.

Depends on how narrow your definition of "pain" is.

Take a plant and put a sharp needle into its growth path. Many plats will avoid it and adjust their growth path, once they got into contact. Just like a human, a dog or a fish. The time scale is different, the effect is the same. It's a sensation that leads to avoidance of a certain negative stimulus.

Correct. Pain just means “similar to human beings’ negative sensory input” which is very myopic, if you think about it.

Nociception and consciousness in plants are actually a matter of debate. There are some recent reviews addressing both topics:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-021-01621-5

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-021-01642-0

This argument is kind of pointless regardless; industrial agriculture kills various small animals (rats, mice, birds, voles etc).

The argument still holds: a vegetarian diet requires way less plants (and thus killing of small animans) because an intermediary is eliminated. Cattle and other animals are good at converting low-grade plant food and leftovers into meat (and milk). But it's more efficient to use insects for that, or to just grow the high-grade plants already.

Yeah, I get that. I was only commenting on the fact that arguments about whether plants feel pain is moot while producing them on the quantities required kills animals which we can all reasonably agree do feel pain.

Is a false problem. This is not about quantity, is about quality.

There are 50-100 species of wild flowers in a meadow and probably other 500 species of invertebrates. In a soy field they is one plant, zero insects and some chemicals, therefore is a worse (not better, worse) option in terms of sustainability or ecology.

Both farming and agriculture can be bad or good. The dichotomy agriculture=good / farming=bad is a ideological construction and a nonsense.

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