You may have been asked, “Do plants feel pain?” It’s an interesting question to consider. So should we be concerned about plants’ feelings? Here are our thoughts:

Do plants feel pain?

The simple answer is that, currently, no one is sure whether plants can feel pain. We do know that they can feel sensations. Studies show that plants can feel a touch as light as a caterpillar’s footsteps. But pain, specifically, is a defense mechanism. If something hurts humans, we react instinctually to it—“fight or flight”—as do other animals. But plants don’t have that ability—nor do they have nervous systems or brains—so they may have no biological need to feel pain. We just don’t know.

However, it is possible that plants have intelligence and sentience that we cannot yet detect. One day, we might learn that plants have ways of experiencing pain that we have yet to comprehend.

Regardless, going vegan is by far your best bet.

We have to eat—it’s a matter of survival. And eating plants directly—rather than feeding them to animals and then killing those animals for their flesh—requires far fewer plants and doesn’t hurt animals, who, we already know for sure, feel pain. So if you worry about plants’ welfare, going vegan is your best option.

You do the math.

Fine, we’ll do it for you. Eighteen vegans could get by on the same amount of resources demanded by just one meat-eater.

You might already know that feeding massive amounts of grain and water to animals and then killing them and processing, transporting, and storing their flesh isn’t environmentally friendly. But did you know that entire forests—which absorb greenhouse gases—are cut down in order to supply pastureland and grow crops for animals on farms? Talk about not plant-friendly.

Eating only plants helps us humans, too. You know all those plants that we feed to animals on farms? If we fed them directly to humans instead, we could end human starvation worldwide. We already grow enough grain to feed billions of humans, but we give about three quarters of it to farmed animals … and then kill them.

For the Love of Plants, Go Vegan

Whether it can be proved that plants experience pain or not, going vegan is your best bet. Vegan foods require the deaths of fewer plants and zero animals. Click below for help getting started on your compassionate journey: