While I am all for animals rights and preventing cruelty to animals, the question I would like to pose to vegetarians here is whether they can justify their actions and their commitment to eating only greens as a superior or noble cause ? Why do I beg to differ ? Why do I feel that vegetarians should be as much in the dock for cruelty as they blame meat eaters for cruelty ?
My reasons are based on the the very real fact that plants are as much alive as animals and us humans. When a vegetarian consumes plants, does he not realize that the grains he is eating are alive and capable of giving rise to new life. Plants are cruelly cut, uprooted from their resting place, their seeds and fruit separated from the parent plant. Just because they are unable to speak, unable to express their pain in cries, are we justified in inflicting so much damage on them ? Because they cannot move, do we remain insensitive and cut them ? It's like ignoring the deaf, dumb, blind, physically handicapped in our societies.
Every plant is a marvelous living being, evolved over millions of years, capable of reproduction - sexual as well as asexual, there are female and male plants, the act of dispersing pollen in nothing short of miraculous. Is an inanimate thing able to do the same? No.
Plants have immune systems that rush to their aid when a plant is injured, just like our immune systems, they have vascular systems that uptake food and water, they bleed sap when they're cut, they adapt themselves to climatic conditions and to potential predators, much like animals in various geographic regions of the world have adapted over the years. If a porcupine can release its quills on contact, there are plants that do the same. Given the right conditions they are able to develop symbiotic relationships with other plants or other species like fungi, bacteria, including animal species. They respond to light and dark, to yearly and monthly cycles.
Plants have totipotent cells that can give rise to the entire organism, much like stem cells. They are able to process complex information, possess electrical signaling and communication, and as JC Bose famously said, 'plants have consciousness'. Much has to be studied about their neurobiological function and behavioral responses. Plants are not merely passive entities subject to environmental stress and factors, but are complex living beings, as complex as any animal species.
Vegetarians do not give a second thought while consuming plants because they don't realize that the very thing they are eating was alive. So it has no voice, so you are insensitive and ignore the fact that it was alive and growing. Isn't that as cruel as killing animals for food ?
When crops are grown, pesticides, fungicides and other sprays are used to kill insects like beetles and locusts that devour and destroy entire crops, to kill microscopic organisms that cause rust and leaf spots and wilting of entire crops, to kill rodents and other burrowing animals that eat root crops. So harvesting crops is at the expense and lives of very many living beings. Even bacteria and fungi have sexual reproduction. They are as alive as you or I.
So I wonder how anyone can justify that being vegetarian is superior or less cruel. There is a line in the Quran which says, 'do not destroy life that is sacred except for just cause'. This is applicable not only to species that move and have voices but to all living beings, plant and animal.
I feel that vegetarians aren't doing the world a favour, nor are they being noble in their deeds. When you realize that everything on Earth is living, that the Earth herself is a living entity, then you find that we're all in the same boat, whether you choose to consume species from the plant or animal kingdoms.
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