this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Because "good" and "bad" have nothing to do with my point, which is about purpose. The purpose of fruits is to be eaten, that is their explicit function. While the pigs get some benefits (in principle, in practice factory farms are horrific places which are absolutely less desirable to the pigs than the wild) they do not volunteer themselves for slaughter the way plants volunteer fruit for consumption.
Being eaten is the core benefit of fruit, and all else being equal being eaten is preferable to not. All else being equal, the pig benefits more by not being eaten, and just living peacefully on a farm.
And how did you determine what the purpose of fruit is? It certainly can't communicate its preferences or desires.
All you can observe is that the species as a whole thrives when fruit is consumed. But the same is true of farm animals. You are simply projecting the motivations you want to see, like self-sacrifice, onto one but not the other. After all, many fruits are poisonous. That suggests that fruits don't want to be eaten, but animals evolved mechanisms to safely eat some fruit.
Finally, factory farms certainly cause animals to suffer but from an evolutionary perspective thriving is not about avoiding suffering. It's about producing offspring, and in that sense farm animals thrive. And given that the OP is about the potential suffering of plants, I don't see why fruit farms are any less horrific than animal farms.
I don't know of a single fruit that's poisonous to every animal. There are fruits that are poisonous to certain animals, but that serves mostly to select for particular animals. A popular example is capsaicin, which is painful for mammals to eat but doesn't affect birds. This suggests that these fruits do want to be eaten, they're just selective about which animals eat them.
And even assuming the most woo-woo levels of plant consciousness, fruit farms create nowhere near the suffering of factory farms. Factory farms are a life of constant suffering, fruit farms are just plants vibing.
Again, you're just debatelording at this point.