Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[TechnoHobbit]

Eagle367 said:

TechnoHobbit said:

You are the one with ridiculous reasoning. By your logic the value of a human life would be equal with that of a plant. Do you seriously not see the difference between abusing and killing something that has the ability to think, to varying degrees, and feel pain (an animal) and killing something that completely lacks any cognitive ability including the ability to feel pain (a plant/fungi)? You should take a course in basic biology

Are you telling me the life of a goat and a human are equal in value? Pain is just a way of the body telling us something is wrong so if plants don't have that then there is nothing wring with their limbs ripped apart? Just because they don't feel it, it is okay to rip and chop them into a thousand pieces. That is absurd.

By your logic, I would assume yes, "we don't get to decide which life is precious." Personally? No, as absurd as it may seem to you I value human life over that of animals and animal life over that of plants. 

That is part of it yes, but that is only part of it. As I mentioned, you should take a basic biology course, the differences between life in the kingdom plantae and the kingdom animalia are quite significant. Just focusing on the morality of the subject, the scientific consensus is that plants lack consciousness (awareness) in the way even the most basic of animals do. As I mentioned before plants lack brains, nervous systems, and even basic organs, the way they have life is completely different from that of animals. Animals clearly (lots that we eat startlingly so) all have some degree of consciousness, ability to feel things (from the basics like pain to complex emotion like fear and sadness), the ability to think, and intelligence. Plants, on the other hand, completely lack these things. If you can't see the difference between the two and why one is a lot better than the other, yikes.

Also, if you do care about the well being of plants, going vegan makes the most sense. I titled the point "least amount of suffering and killing", and that would stand true even if plants somehow did have the things mentioned above that animals do (which they almost certainly don't). Vegans actually cause a lot less plants to die than meat eaters because guess what? Farm animals eat plants and a lot of them. World wide over 50% of grains are fed to livestock and in the US 70% of all crops are, not to mention we would have a ton more free land for plants to grow freely as the grazing lands would be freed up. Also along those lines animal agriculture is reasonable for 91% of Amazon deforestation. That is a lot of plants wasted to feed you and others (especially since that food could to help end world hunger, back in the 90s the US alone could feed 800 million with the amount we grow and I'm sure it has only grown since then).