Respectfully, you and most people have no clue what plants experience. There were those studies published in recent years that suggested plants "scream" when they are being eaten or destroyed, presumably to warn other plants.
We don't know what anything or anyone else experiences internally. But we know enough to make some good guesses.
Plants lack a brain, the organ responsible for thoughts. There's no more reason to think they have thoughts than a cell inside your body, or a computer. All three can process stimuli and communicate.
"Screaming" is editorializing for page views. They found some plants will produce an ultrasonic click every few minutes when dry or when cut. Because it's sound, and because we're looking at it with a human bias, some articles used the term "scream". But it's similar to when plants release chemical signals to communicate. Just because it's sound, it doesn't indicate they subjectively feel pain anymore than chemical signals would. (And chemical signals are used by cells in your body, and that also isn't evidence for consciousness.)
That seems like a bit of a non sequitur. I thought we were discussing whether plants have feelings.
Killing animals painlessly is certainly better than killing them painfully. There are a lot more problems than just the killing though. From the Wikipedia article on slaughterhouses:
> Eiznitz interviewed slaughterhouse workers representing over two million hours of experience, who, without exception, told her that they have beaten, strangled, boiled and dismembered animals alive or have failed to report those who do. The workers described the effects the violence has had on their personal lives, with several admitting to being physically abusive or taking to alcohol and other drugs.
> The HFA alleges that workers are required to kill up to 1,100 hogs an hour and end up taking their frustration out on the animals. Eisnitz interviewed one worker, who had worked in ten slaughterhouses, about pig production. He told her:
> "Hogs get stressed out pretty easy. If you prod them too much, they have heart attacks. If you get a hog in the chute that's had the shit prodded out of him and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. You're dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams – thighs – completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward."
Ozzy Osbourne's first job was working in a slaughterhouse. It had a big affect on him! Seriously, check out his book.
Also I have a friend who was vegetarian as a teenager, she wanted to become a vet and one of the things they do is suggest you go to a slaughterhouse and see how it works. She is no longer a vegetarian and loves eating meat, but she didn't become a vet either!
This is ridiculous. Consciousness may be mysterious, but the fact that something emits sound when you break it doesn’t bring it into the same ethical domain as cows and other mammals with brains and an obvious desire and ability to avoid pain and death.
The same reason anaesthesia doesn’t make it okay to kill humans. There’s lots more on this in chapter 4 (“What's Wrong with Killing?”) of Singer’s Practical Ethics, if you’re interested.
Well, if we are to follow the parent's mention of Peter Singer, you could go check out just about any source of preference utilitarianism. Briefly:
An animal has a conscious will to live on, a preference so to say, and those preferences are the basis of moral consideration.
A plant lacks those kinds of preferences (lacking any brain activity - what we can see are mostly just hormonal cell responses and such; things that all living cells have) and thus the plant in itself is not worthy of moral consideration.
