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Originally Posted by Baltar  As far as plants go though, I don't see any problem with eating them. Plants don't have a nervous system, they don't feel pain. They also live in a symbiotic relationship with animals -- animals provide plants with food by exhaling carbon dioxide, and animal waste is fertilizer for plants. Plants provide animals with food and oxygen. They can't live without us, and we can't live without them. |
I was thinking about this today and was a little stumped. Plants don't feel pain... but I think the "green thumb" effect has to do with how positive human energy can help plants grow. This kind of goes back to that Myth Busters episode I saw where a plant hooked up to a ploygraph showed stress when a team member sent evil intentions to the plant. (I know, good TV, but hardly scientific.) Also with a tidbit I read in a book on bioenergy that showed that, if you cut a leaf in half and then photograph it in a special way, its energy pattern still shows a whole leaf. (In the book, this was tied into "ghost limbs" felt by amputees.) So if the basis of everything is energy, how is a human different than a plant on an energetic level? Do plants have souls? Or are plants simply repositories of energy that can and should be used to fuel the life and growth of animals and humans?
I apologize about the new-ageyness of that paragraph in a thread outside of the spiritual/paranormal forums, by the way.
The idea that everything has bioenergy is a completely foreign concept that I've only recently started researching.
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Originally Posted by Baltar Ok, so mass harvesting kills animals. That sucks, I agree. But how about we take into consideration that most of the harvest goes toward feeding farm animals? Escapee posted that "more than 90% of all agricultural land in Britain is used to feed animals." Extrapolating that data, if people didn't eat animals, then there'd be 90% less field animals killed because we'd be harvesting 90% less plants. That book's argument only makes sense if farm animals were raised solely on naturally growing fields with no livestock feed harvesting by humans. That's simply impossible because of how much livestock is being raised. |
That's a very good point! The ecological effects of agriculture is such a multifaceted topic.