Plants Feel Pain Too

I’ve heard this a couple of times so this was one of the first arguments that I looked into. It’s interesting because if plants do feel pain then even being vegan is still cruel and then there’s less of a point in trying to avoid cruelty at all.

A quick Google search suggests not, but let’s break down the biology and the maths to be extra sure.

Firstly, what is pain?

Similar to the “do animals feel pain” article let’s start with the definition of pain.

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as:

An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.

The keywords here for our understanding are “emotional experience”. It is a subjective, conscious experience, which means that this is a feeling that is only happening in ones own mind. For a living thing to feel pain, it needs a brain and a central nervous system to process the feelings i.e. a conscious mind.

Without consciousness, physical signals are just data… This leads us on to the first argument:

The Hardware Flaw

To experience subjective suffering, an organism needs the biological hardware to process it:

• a brain
• a central nervous system
• nociceptors (pain receptors).

Plants do not possess any of these.

And if we wanna get technical about it, here’s a quote from a recent study that aims to debunk the idea that plants feel pain:

In plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal (recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite for consciousness Debunking a myth: plant consciousness

Then there are also leading plant biologists writing in Trends in Plant Science (2019) that put it bluntly when they say it’s “extremely unlikely that plants, lacking any anatomical structures remotely comparable to the complexity of the threshold brain, possess consciousness.”

So no brain, no cental nervous system, no nociceptors, no consciousness, no pain.

The square root of the issue

But let’s say the evidence above is wrong and plants do feel pain. Then veganism is in a pickle, right? Not quite, because veganism is about reducing unnecessary suffering, and if you do the “painful” maths, I still have to be vegan.

We establish in the efficiency check, the laws of thermodynamics mean you lose the vast majority of calories when you feed plants through an animal before consuming the animal. According to A Well-Fed World, cattle convert crops at a massive net loss, returning just 1% of the calories they eat as edible meat and requiring up to 25 pounds of feed to produce a single pound of beef.

If you truly believe plants feel pain, the most logical, mathematically sound way to reduce “plant murder” is to stop feeding them to livestock and just eat them directly.

Either plants don’t feel pain, making the argument biologically void, or they do feel pain, making a plant-based diet the only mathematically ethical choice.