Why “Plants Have Feelings Too” Is a Terrible Argument Against Veganism
- Paul D. Wilke
- 12 minutes ago
- 10 min read
Do Plants Have Feelings Too?
I’ve endured many dubious arguments against veganism over the years. Some challenge me more than others. But by far the worst is “plants have feelings too.” They almost certainly don’t. Most scientists would agree that they lack a central nervous system and a brain, and so don't feel pain or pleasure like animals do.
Sensational headlines claiming plants are “screaming” or “talking” are anthropomorphizing more mundane chemical responses to environmental conditions. Don’t get me wrong—the plant world is remarkably diverse and complex. However, complexity does not equal sentience. Compelling scientific arguments against plant sentience have been made elsewhere (here, here, and here). That’s not what I want to do.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume plants do have feelings.
That will be the operating assumption for the rest of this essay, even though I don’t believe it. Consider this a thought experiment. If this is true, then vegans must be just as guilty of causing suffering and death as non-vegans, who might then console themselves that there is no moral difference between the two.
Everyone has to eat, and if plants and animals both have some level of sentience (or "feelings"), no one is exempt from the remorseless cycle of life. This is the thrust of the “plants have feelings too” argument. It's an attempt to demonstrate a moral equivalence. If this is indeed true, it means consumption is an inescapable part of this world because life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life,…etc.
I say, not so fast.
Assuming sentient plants are among us, veganism is still the best choice if one’s intent is to reduce unnecessary suffering, even if death remains an inevitable part of the process. But I also want to show how our food system leads to an enormous increase in both plant and animal mortality. Most don’t realize how much land we dedicate to meat and dairy production. If you don’t, you will by the end of this essay.
I’ll add parenthetically that veganism’s goal is the reduction of unnecessary cruelty and exploitation of animals "as far as is possible and practicable," It's not about the total elimination of suffering and death. That’s impossible.
I’m using suffering as the ethical north star. But how do we measure the quantity of suffering? We can't, not really. Therefore, I'll also discuss deaths from land use, as they are measurable stand-ins for the scale of harm. Keep this distinction in mind; it’s crucial for the argument I’m going to make.
What do I want to achieve here? Two very modest things.
First, to give vegans and vegetarians a more intuitive and less technical response when someone (inevitably) runs the smirky "plants have feelings" gambit on them.
But also, for you omnivores out there, I hope you’ll read this and realize this claim isn’t the devastating rhetorical killshot against veganism you might think it is.
Okay, so we're assuming that plants have feelings.
How is veganism better?
Eating Adolescence
Factory farming prioritizes profits over animal welfare. The industry aims to get livestock up to slaughter weight as quickly and inexpensively as possible. After all, consumers want affordable meat and dairy. A few unfortunate animals have been selectively bred to grow much faster than they would in the wild, which allows us to butcher them in their childhood or adolescence.
Beef cattle that might live up to twenty years are slaughtered within 15-18 months. Pigs might make it 15 or 20 years, but become pork and bacon after only six months. Broiler chickens, of which over 75 billion (and rising) are consumed annually, are still “children” when their throats are slit at six or seven weeks. Depending on the breed, these chickens might otherwise survive far longer. Each year, around 200 million turkeys, the most iconic of American birds, are sent to slaughter at 4 to 5 months of age, or when they are still juveniles. Wild turkeys survive 3 to 5 years.
The egg industry gasses or macerates about seven billion day-old male chicks each year. In the U.S., the number reaches 350 million. As males, they can't lay eggs, so they're worthless. They aren’t meaty enough to justify the cost of raising them. That's what those 75 billion broilers were bred for.
What’s the common thread here?
We butcher the animals we eat before they've lived a fraction of their lives. It gets worse.
They live in appalling conditions — cramped cages and pens in dark, crowded buildings. Again, economies of scale, not animal welfare concerns, drive the industry.
Don’t let those happy cartoon pigs and cows on the labels of your meat fool you. To paraphrase and repurpose Thomas Hobbes (and with all due apologies to the great philosopher), factory-farmed animals live nasty, brutish, and short lives to save us money and fill our bellies.
Eating Senescence
Now contrast this with the plants we consume. Let’s start with the annuals that play out their life cycle in one growing season. Common examples are corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. Annuals take up about 70 percent of the world’s cropland and grow 80 percent of our food. An annual’s natural biological life cycle is to mature, produce seeds, and perish at the close of a single season.
This is called monocarpic senescence, a genetically programmed process occurring at the end of the growing season. In one last burst of energy, the plant mobilizes its remaining nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from its leaves and transfers them into the fruits or grains we harvest.
This is why corn and soybeans dry out in September. It’s how wheat gets its beautiful golden color in the fall. We’re only consuming them at the end of their natural life cycle after they've served their biological purpose. Put another way, we’re harvesting their legacy as they die.
And note the difference: Annuals planted for consumption aren’t grown in dark buildings locked in small, feces-filled cages, like chickens and pigs. No, they’re out under the big blue sky, in open fields, and getting all the sunlight and rain they need.
That's not all. Farmers also fertilize the soil to promote growth. They apply pesticides and herbicides to protect their crops. In contrast to animal agriculture, every aspect of crop agriculture incentivizes growers to take great care of their crops. They aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. But in this case, what's economical encourages plant health.
If you’re a sentient corn stalk that humans need, life is pretty good.
It gets even better when we talk about perennials.
Think about it: If you’re eating an apple or a banana, no plant “murder” occurs. You’re simply consuming the fruit from a tree in some orchard somewhere, likely from a tree that will continue growing more fruit for many years to come. Like annuals, the perennials we eat are very well-maintained.
Something else to keep in mind, fruits, berries, and nuts evolved to be eaten so that animals will disperse the seeds. In other words, it’s a mutually beneficial transaction. Our sentient perennials offer us something edible and nutritious. In return, they have carved a pretty sweet niche for themselves. They are cared for, tended, protected, and nourished by us.
Yet, there’s no way to eat a steak or chicken wing without the animal's death. The closest analogy in animal agriculture is dairy cows, which produce milk. This is ethically problematic, though, since cows must be artificially inseminated to continue producing milk. Also problematic: Once they give birth, their calves are taken from them.
This is how dairy farmers keep the milk flowing for us. Cows don't produce milk for us naturally. They have to be induced to do so. After a few short years of this exploitative cycle, after the milk dries up, the cows are shipped off to become ground beef.
Keep this in mind when you hear someone wax philosophical about how “everything is violence,” or “life feeds on life,” as if to evoke some pseudospiritual equivalence between eating an apple and slaughtering a pig or exploiting a cow. You can dismiss this as a category error. It’s not the same thing.
Up to this point, I’ve made a moral argument that the sentient plants we consume live far better lives relative to livestock. Assuming sentience, the harms aren’t morally equivalent between plants and animals.
Annuals are cultivated to thrive through their full life cycle before we harvest them; perennials are maintained to keep producing for years. Meanwhile, the animals we eat are confined in atrocious conditions and killed young.
If we grant sentience, then it seems far better to be a plant than an animal in our food system.
The Math of Suffering: Vegan Land Use vs. Meat Land Use
So much for the severity; now let's look at the scale. I can imagine a reasonable objection to my framing might go something like this: “Okay, fine, but what about the environmental impact of modern agriculture — plant and animal — and how it devastates ecosystems and reduces biodiversity?”
It's a very fair point.
Nowhere is this more evident than here in Central Illinois, where two monocrops—corn and soybeans—dominate the landscape. Those two crops may lead charmed lives if they are sentient, but at what cost to the environment?
Indeed, as I type these words in late winter, I look out the window in my office and gaze upon ugly and empty fields stretching as far as my eyes can see. In a few months, this will be a uniform green filled with corn and soybeans.
As I wrote above, this is certainly a good situation for these monocrops (if not for the environment as a whole). If you’re a sentient corn stalk or a soybean, your growing season will be a comfortable one, safe from weeds and pests, bathing in the sun and drinking down the rain. You are only harvested days before the first frost would kill you anyway.
But what about everything else? What about the native flora and fauna that have been pushed to the brink of extinction over the last century to make way for these two crops?
Yes, that's a problem until you look at how our land is used.
People don’t realize how much of the Earth's agricultural land is dedicated to animal agriculture. Globally, only 55 percent of crops are grown for direct human consumption. Another 36 percent goes to feed livestock. If we combine pastures and cropland used for animal feed (mostly corn and soy), about 80 percent of all agricultural land is reserved for meat and dairy production.
These numbers are more lopsided in the United States, where only 15 percent of cereal crops are for direct human consumption. Most soybeans, about 75 percent, and just under half of the corn, around 40 percent, feed livestock, not us. Two major drivers of deforestation in the Amazon are the creation of croplands for soybeans (to feed livestock) and new pastures for cattle
Researchers estimate a plant-based world could reduce the amount of land needed to feed everyone by 75 percent, from 4.1 billion hectares to 1 billion hectares, or an area roughly the size of the United States and Brazil combined.
Also, producing meat is so energy inefficient. It takes 25 kilograms of feed to produce a single kilogram of edible beef. The ratios aren’t so bad for poultry (3:1) and pigs (6.4:1), but they aren’t exactly examples of efficiency either.
The undeniable fact is that animals eat a lot of plants before reaching slaughter weight. If you care about a plant’s feelings, consider how, when you eat meat, you’re also eating all the plants the animal ate, enormously amplifying the amount of death involved. In truth, you're eating several layers of suffering and death when you eat meat.
This also counters the crop-death argument I encounter so often, which claims that growing vegan foods causes millions of accidental wildlife deaths. Some dare to argue that a vegan diet is responsible for more deaths than a non-vegan one. That is just not true.
I debunked this claim elsewhere, so I won’t spend too much time on it. For my purposes here, it’s enough to understand that so many of our crops are already dedicated to feeding livestock, not people. Wildlife deaths in soybean and corn fields can’t be blamed on vegans.
Animal agriculture causes much more incidental destruction to wildlife and their habitats than a vegan diet does, once you include the pesticides, the herbicides, and the elimination of “pest” wildlife that interfere with farmers’ profitability.
Again, I’m not saying eating vegan makes one totally free from death. Of course not. But it's far less than the alternative.
What if the world shifted to plant-based diets instead? So much land could be repurposed to grow other crops directly consumed by humans. Or, we could just let Mother Nature reclaim the land we no longer need to feed ourselves.
If plants do indeed have feelings, this wouldn't be a perfect world, for such will never exist, but it wouldn't be a bad one for plants and animals alike.
Final Thoughts
Yes, I know, how serious should I take the “plants have feelings too” argument? It’s so bad. I’m never quite certain whether the person making it is being serious or not, or whether they were just looking to troll vegans.
Unfortunately, I ran into this recently from someone who passionately made the case. I was baffled at the time. I kept waiting for the wink or smirk to give the game away, to let me know he was pulling my leg and having a little fun with the plant eater. But he wasn’t. He truly believed it.
I went home, got online, and discovered, to my dismay, that the "plants have feelings" trope is a common anti-vegan talking point. How is this so? It's so stupid.
Anyway, I’ve become pessimistic in recent years about my ability to change anyone's mind on this issue, so I mostly don’t even try. I shut up and eat my tofu and salad, and don't make a big deal about it. To be fair, most meat-eating folks I encounter are accepting and accommodating of my plant-based diet. I accord them the same respect. It's mostly a non-issue in my life.
Every so often, though, someone wants to try me, not realizing I’ve heard it all a thousand times and have done my homework far better than they have. It never goes well for them.
But is it even worth responding? I confess, probably not. It changes nothing.
And yet, here I am, on my little blog, peeved a bit, I must admit, writing a little essay that will make little difference in a world full of indifference when it comes to food choices.
But that’s okay. I’ve said my piece. I can move on now. The itch has been scratched. I've howled at the moon. Shouted into the well. Whatever.
I think I’ll have an apple and reflect on the happy little tree it came from on some pleasant orchard somewhere in the beautiful state of Washington.
And then I'll smile because there was not a single slaughterhouse involved between that faraway apple tree and my stomach.
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PDW
26 Feb 2026
Dry Grove, Illinois