Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?
> Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).
Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit.
If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.
So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"
Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.
I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii for instance).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?