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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Only someone who knows nothing about external female anatomy thinks “nards” could possibly be a gender neutral term. But do tell me what plural parts of her genitalia that would show up in a typical naked baby photo would count as “nards.”

    Believe it or not, I don’t have a single photo of my daughter’s ovaries or fallopian tubes. They’re way too far up inside her for a camera to capture.




  • Specific knowledge? My whole point here is that there isn’t enough knowledge. Why do I need specific knowledge to say “this field is changing by the day and we keep learning plants are able to do all sorts of things we thought you needed a nervous system for, so it is not inconceivable that plants feel pain?”

    You do know that I have never made the claim that plants definitely do feel pain, right? I never even claimed that they feel pain the same way an animal does. I even suggested that what they would feel could be described as pain even though it wasn’t the sort of thing we would anthropogenically think of as pain because we do not have good definitions for the concept of pain or the concept of suffering.

    I’m not sure why I need to repeat myself like this when I made all of this clear in my initial post.







  • Damaged plants can send out signals to other plants, and chemicals to repel what is damaging them (to the specific area where the damage is being done) and repair their damage. Some plants will avoid growing towards areas that they have been unable to thrive in before.

    You still seem to be talking about things from a purely human perspective. Dogs will damage their feet and not even let you know sometimes. They will get a piece of glass in their foot and they won’t stop walking on them or try to do anything about it until they literally can’t do anything about it. My dog tore her CCL and the only reason we knew anything was wrong was that she wasn’t limping and then she was a few moments later. She didn’t make a sound, she didn’t react with any sort of signal that indicated that she was aware serious damage had been done to her, she just was unable to use that leg. Are you going to argue that she felt no pain?




  • But trees or mosses or whatever do none of this. A tree will keep trying to grow towards a fence that damages branches in a storm, a tree never starves itself to death making thicker bark after teens carve lovehearts into it, a tree doesn’t stop reproducing after 3 droughts kill all its children and so on. Leaves might change colour in response to periods of high or low sunlight but these changes are like tanning, they don’t modify anything about how the tree trees.

    I don’t know why any of this means that our nebulous definitions of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ cannot apply to plants.

    If I stub my toe, it doesn’t modify anything about how I human. But it hurts.





  • But what I am arguing is that is an anthropocentric view of what constitutes pain and suffering. We cannot assume either is not possible without a nervous system. It’s worth at least looking into the concept even though we don’t know that there would be a mechanism simply based on what we know about plants so far. I myself would put myself on the no side when it comes to whether or not plants feel pain, but I couldn’t say that it was a 100% definite no by any means and I think we may feel very differently about what it means to be a plant and what plants are capable of in 20 years.