Many vegetarians choose to eat an animal-free diet because they believe cows, hogs, chickens and goats have the same desire for life as humans. An op-ed in the New York Times might give these vegetarian eaters pause. The author, Natalie Angier, suggests that vegetables have feelings, too.
To support her argument, Angier spoke to UC Riverside genetics professor Linda Walling. Walling said plants can’t run away from a threat, but they are good at avoiding being eaten. But she wasn't talking about their ability to avoid being eaten by humans.
"It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome (the plant's) defenses," Walling was quoted in the story. After an insect's first bite, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky sap to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response.
A different professor, Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin, spoke more directly to plants' human-like traits.
"They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk (through chemical signals). These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Hilker was quoted in the story.
So does that make vegetarians no more compassionate than carnivores?
Perhaps Tim Carmen of the Washington City Paper blog Young and Hungry said it best when he commented on the New York Times article.
"The answer, I think, is not to stop eating everything because everything has a right to live and we don’t have a right to eat them. The answer is to better understand our role in the greater ecosystem called Earth," Carmen wrote.
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