6 Answers to a Meat-Eater saying 'Plants are alive and feel Pain, too!'

Everybody who has been reading my diary for some time and those who have been looking around the different topics I have been writing about, knows that I am a vegetarian, my family is vegetarian and our whole town is vegetarian. You may also have read or heard me advocating vegetarianism which I will definitely always keep on doing. One of the counter-arguments of meat-eaters often seems so silly to me that I don’t have words to answer: “But why do you kill plants? They are also alive and feel pain!” I decided to gather together all my thoughts and write them down here. In future, whenever this question makes me speechless, I have a blog post to refer the person to.

So here are my answers for you:

Don’t you think you are just being defensive because you know how much suffering your meat-eating causes?
Most of the times, when you eat a vegetable, it does not mean you kill the whole plant! If you pick a tomato off its bush, it will just regrow! Cut your spinach, eat it and let it grow again. Did you ever try that with a chicken wing? No, it does not regrow!
Maybe you argue now that it hurts the tomato plant each time that I pick a tomato off it, just as it would hurt me if someone pulled off a bunch of hair from my head. If you really want to use this kind of comparison, just think of all the hair that is falling off your head every day – picking a ripe tomato is much more like that, easy, painless and it is anyway due to fall off.
Why, really why do you think plants feel pain? Did it scream when you pulled it? Did it run away? I don’t think so! You cannot say that about those millions of pigs, cows, goats, sheep and chicken that are killed every day. There are lots of documentaries that show the fear of those animals when they know they are going to be killed – I have never seen such a thing in plants. Have you?
If we just assume that you actually ‘kill’ plants like wheat when you harvest them, let’s just count how many of them got killed for my food and how many you indirectly killed for eating your meat. How many plants did that poor cow eat before it was slaughtered and ended up on your plate? And how many not re-growing plants do I eat every day? I think you are the one who kills more of them!
If you really think that plants feel pain and if you are really concerned about this, shouldn’t you especially have the morals not to kill animals? And if you really believe this, you should only eat fruit and vegetables that have fallen off their trees and bushes – then you would not hurt any of them.

So you see, that argument did not actually turn out to be anti-vegetarian at all but rather anti-meat-eating! I hope this will help some more vegetarians who are not willing to discuss this topic with anybody who makes such a stupid counter-argument. I will definitely save this link and use it as my standard answer as of now.