Screams of Death From a Field of Broccoli?

Researchers from the University of Missouri have found that plants hear, and react, to the sound of eating caterpillars but ignore the sound of wind.

What's that mean?  It means that plants are sentient.  They feel fear, which means they feel pain.

And guess what?

Plants actually "scream," of a sort, when attacked.

Researchers at the Institute for Applied Physics at the University of Bonn in Germany, found that plants give off ethylene gas when the sound of attack from bugs and other destructive invaders is played. When super-sensitive laser probes were placed on the plants, and ethylene gas production was registered as a sound, plant "noises" were heard to rise to a piercing screech.  And it did not take a lot of destruction to illicit a cry of pain from a plant -- even a tiny insect bite could generate increased ethylene gas production and a sound effect.

"The more a plant is subjected to stress, the louder the signal," said Dr Frank Kühnemann.

What does this mean for vegetarians who gobble down a head of lettuce and who proclaim that a rat is a pig is a dog is a child -- or that the death of a common marmot is the same as the death of an endangered elephant?

It's going to be a problem!

PeTA's own Ingrid Newkirk starts off her post proclaiming "a rat is a pig, is a dog, is a boy," by quoting Mark Twain:

“It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”

But if plants can be said to react to the sound of destruction by signaling distress, how can Ms. Newkirk continue to eat?

If we are to blur the lines between rats and children, why is this same blurring not appropriate for the difference between a carrot, a bit of broccoli, or a field of wheat and a rat?

Under her own logic, a carrot is a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy.

And of course, we have not even started with bacteria, fungus, nematodes, and worms.  All of these living animals can actually be trained to perform.  These are not just reactive animals that scream every bit as much a clump of broccoli -- they can actually plan as Charles Darwin himself showed.

They are all living and very sentient things.

And yet the simple act of plowing a field for a vegan diet approved by PeTA kills hundreds, if not thousands. This is direct murder at the hand of man.

If all plants and all animals are equal, is it not better to shoot the largest wild animal one can find once or twice a year, rather than kill millions of animals and plants a season in order to fill the pot?